“I am speaking just as a philosopher. People sometimes call me a religious leader. I am not that. I have no messages, no mission. I attempt only to understand. We are philosophers in the old sense of the word, lovers of wisdom. That avoids the sometimes questionable company of those who offer a religion.”

— C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98

“I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.”

— C.G. Jung, BBC Interview with John Freeman, 1959

Someone asked me recently, "What is it about Jungian psychology that is so different?” The answer to this question is almost too big for one post, let alone a paragraph or a simple response to a casual inquiry— but this morning, Easter Sunday, feels like a good day to sit down with the question.

Jung’s psychology is so vastly different that it’s not even taught in mainstream university programs. In our increasingly rational, materialistic1 culture, Jung’s metaphysical concepts, techniques of dream interpretation, and study of things like alchemy and fairy tales tend to make people uncomfortable. In my own grad school program, for example, one professor stated breezily, “We know now there’s no such thing as the ‘unconscious.’ People have behaviors based on cognitions, and we change those. That’s it.”2

As you can see by the two quotes at the head of this post, Jung struggled mightily with these concepts himself. He knew that in order to be taken seriously, his concepts had to be “scientific;” and yet in his own experience, and in his extensive experience with his patients, he found that there was evidence of something greater than Western science could grasp; what he called the Self.3

The Self, says Edward Edinger, is “the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche.” It has a transpersonal quality; that is, it is something greater than us, beyond us. The “ordering and unifying” aspect is what gives our life meaning. With this understanding, we can recognize that symptoms have what is referred to as a teleological function: they are moving us toward something; our life’s unique path.

“Intellectually the self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the ‘God within.’”

– C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Jung believed that the Self operates as both the “center and the circumference” of the psyche. It is both our inner image of the divine, and the container that acts as its outermost limit.

Encounters with the Self

The Self, according to Jung, shows its presence in dreams, visions, creative products (such as art of all kinds), traumatic events4, and even in waking life, often in surprising ways. He believed that encounters with the Self always had a “numinous” quality— a word he borrowed from the theologian Rudolf Otto:

“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of— whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

-R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy

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Numinous encounters, as Otto says, have a quality about them that is undeniable: we feel them in our body as terror, awe, or overwhelming love; they are beyond words. They have a relativizing effect; we are at once humbled and cognizant of our place in the order of things. As a result, Lionel Corbett says, these encounters restructure our psyche:

“Their efficacy in doing so is the result of their tremendous affective intensity, which alone is able to dislodge entrenched patterns with such speed… it is as if the intensity of the affect associated with the new experience disrupts and dissipates existing structures and defenses and replaces them with something new… The affective component of the experience is also the major vehicle for the cognitive level of the experience to be driven home.5”

Despite our culture’s unease with topics that stray into the realm of the “woo,” there is evidence that bears out these concepts. Researchers are studying awe as a “pathway to physical and mental health.” Of course, if you’ve had one of these experiences yourself, you already know what a tremendous impact these moments hold. Like Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 astronaut, whose 1968 broadcast from orbit summed up his own numinous experience. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” he said.

If you click on the “researchers” link above, you can view a diagram that maps exactly how these states of “awe” affect our body’s systems, decreasing physical symptoms such as anxiety, stress, and pain, while increasing prosocial behavior, our sense of meaning, and overall well-being. But this was no secret to Jung, who knew that the “approach to the numinous” was, in fact, the “real therapy:”

“The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”

— C.G. Jung, Letter to P.W. Martin, August 20, 1945. Letters, Vol. 1

Organized religion & the Self

Within this framework of Jung’s Self and the numinous, there are endless variations for spiritual diversity. Each individual can (and, he might even say, should) have their own unique relationship with the transpersonal. But what about religion? Where do Catholics, Jews, Muslims, fit into this schema?

The image below from Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype demonstrates how organized religion can act as a group container for the Self. In this configuration, each individual member (illustrated by the circles at the bottom) need not have a personal relationship with the divine, because it is carried by the Church itself. This, Edinger says, is a stable state for a community.

This is not at all a problematic situation, or a psychologically unhealthy one. These individuals have a relationship with the transpersonal that is quite functional.

But what happens when this system begins to break down? For example, when beloved religious leaders are found to be frauds, or spiritual abuse is revealed?

This second image shows how the individuals at the bottom are left to find their own relationship to the Self. While some of them (such as the circle on the far left) succeed in connecting directly to their Self-image (perhaps through an encounter with the numinous, as described above), others are not so lucky.

Some, like the second circle, become alienated from the Self: cynical, jaded, isolated.

Others, such as the third circle, decide that they are the Self: they become inflated, delusions of grandeur, etc; maybe they go set up their own new religion.

And others (illustrated by the rest of the circles)— do not seek a personal relationship with the divine, but instead, look for another container for their spiritual needs— like Capitalism, MAGA, Fundamentalism, Communism, Fascism, or Healthism.

Edinger goes on to warn about the dangers of this situation:

“When the archetypes have no adequate container such as an established religious structure, they have to go somewhere else because the archetypes are facts of psychic life. One possibility is that they will be projected onto banal or secular matters…. This is particularly dangerous because whenever a religious motivation is acting unconsciously it causes fanaticism with all its destructive consequences.”

This is very clearly the situation we find ourselves in now.

Finding our way to the Self

This is why I find that Jung’s psychology is so essential for our times. In his 1957 essay, The Undiscovered Self, he speaks directly to what happens when our collective container is no longer sufficient, and we find ourselves in that second picture of Edinger’s:

“Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The State in particular is turned into a quasi- animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society—the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.”

He says that the antidote— the only hope for individuals, and for humanity as a whole— lies in our ability to connect to our own understanding of what he calls “God” (but can be read as “the Self”):

“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

In a later section, he goes on to add, in italics of his own, emphasizing the importance of these words:“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”

How, then, do we begin to connect to the Self; to begin to understand what is our role in this resistance?

Dreams are one way (and one I use frequently with my own clients). But we can also dialogue with our unconscious through creative practices (like the one shown below); through divinatory work such as the I Ching, or the Tarot (my friend and colleague Amy Lawson is a wonderful resource); through journaling, meditation, and prayer.

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The practice below is from my online subscription site (as a reminder, paid subscribers get free access to all of the videos there, but I wanted to share this one with all of you today!). In this short video, join me for a simple creative practice based on Jung’s work. You’ll just need paper and some drawing tools (crayons are fine!), and a little quiet time to be with yourself.

If you do practice “with me” here, I’d love to hear how it went (or see your drawing, if you’d like to share!). And, as always, I really value your reflections on my writings and ideas.

Wishing you a special day, no matter what your spiritual orientation.

xo-

LBW

It's not that easy bein' green
Having to spend each day
The color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer
Bein' red or yellow or gold
Or something much more colorful like that…

I was just a little kid, but my insides reverberated to the mournful tone of my favorite frog’s lament. It’s not easy being different. It’s lonely, it’s isolated, it’s terribly, terribly sad.

Since writing about the double bind last week, I’ve been thinking about the double binds of my own life: the mismatch between my own needs and our culture’s expectations for me, and what is created in the space between.

A triple bind

The essence of the double bind is that one is faced with two conflicting demands, neither of which can be satisfied. The situation is not one that can be avoided, and to name the bind makes it worse.

I remember being depressed as early as kindergarten, when I learned that I had twelve more years of school to live through. TWELVE YEARS OF MISERY. How would I survive, I wondered? The future stretched before me, a bleak, anxious timescape that had to be navigated, I felt, alone.

It wasn’t just school: I cried at sleepovers and had to be driven home, ashamed, but secretly grateful to get back home to my safe, comfortable bed. At the bus stop, one morning, a (horrible) little girl said to me, “My mom doesn’t like you.” Shocked, I asked, “why?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re weird.”

I mean, by typical standards, I was weird. I was devouring books faster than my parents could take me to the library. I made elaborate mansions out of old shoe boxes and played by myself for hours on end. Attempts to get me to join Girl Scouts, 4H, ballet, etc., all ended with me dropping out— I couldn’t tolerate the experiences, and I couldn’t explain why. My parents were concerned and confused by my introversion. “You have to do something,” they said. What kind of kid doesn’t want to spend time with her peers? What kind of girl just wants to stay home with her dog? This girl. This girl right here.

I saw my first mental health counselor in the third grade because school made me cry. This was my first taste of bad therapy; the only effect I can remember is feeling more depressed, isolated, and anxious. I had no context to understand my unhappiness (and, sadly, my therapist didn’t know enough to provide it).

I couldn’t recognize that what I was experiencing was a shocking mismatch between my needs and the environment in which I had been placed. All I knew was that I was not having the experience that my peers were having. I didn’t know what was wrong, so I learned that I must be wrong.

This is what I think of as the “triple bind:” because the bind is unnameable (in this case, I was too deeply ashamed to even consider talking about it)— we internalize the outer expectation. We learn to put pressure on ourselves to perform, and to conform. We blame ourselves when we don’t meet societal standards. Some of us— many of my clients— bind ourselves so tightly that when we finally do meet someone who is able to mirror our experience, who is able to say, “there’s nothing wrong with you.” we cannot accept that this might be true.

It is too painful to recognize what we’ve been denied.

The individuation process

While my experience sounds extreme, this is a dilemma that each of us knows intimately, because it’s at the heart of being human. Each of us must conform, to some degree, to the circumstances of our family, peers, and society. This is how we achieve a certain amount of success in life, after all: we follow rules, get an education, gain employment, etc.

In traditional Jungian literature, this conforming is the essential task of the first half of life, and that the process of individuation takes place later, at midlife, when we start to question the values we’ve internalized. Later Jungians, such as , author of Quarterlife, argue that this timeline doesn’t make sense in current culture. that we must grapple with the issue of what she calls “stability” vs. “meaning” as part of our developmental task of individuation much earlier than Jung stated. This formulation makes sense when I consider how very lost I felt as a kid. I wasn’t able to conform— a problem I see a lot of quarter lifers are experiencing today.

Our personal individuation journey doesn’t always follow a tidy trajectory. I was a hot mess well into my thirties, when I finally learned how to play the game well enough to have a career, start a retirement fund, buy a house. But I was still struggling with social conformity. In one memorable vignette, my boss called me into his office to say: “I’m concerned that you haven’t made any friends here.” My stomach drops, remembering that feeling. I was that “weird” little girl, five years old all over again, just waiting to get home to hug her dog and cry.

The process of individuation, theoretically anyway, is to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we’ve denied ourselves, or that we’ve been denied by the collective values of our culture. This is very difficult when we have been convinced that we are the problem; even more so when we have convinced ourselves that we are the problem. In Jungian language, these ideas about ourselves are complexes that must be recognized and integrated, often with the help of a therapist, coach, or other professional who is able to see the truths we’ve had to hide from ourselves.

Neurodivergence and Jungian psychology

Unlike Freud, who framed deviation from the norm in terms of repression and dysfunction, Jung saw psychological variation as meaningful and essential to psychic wholeness. The concept of individuation itself implicitly honors the idea of neurodiversity, recognizing that each of us has our own unique blueprint to follow.

Jung’s early work with psychosis at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich put him in direct contact with patients diagnosed with “dementia praecox,” which we might now call schizophrenia. Rather than dismissing their experience as nonsense, Jung recognized that the symbolic content they shared was meaningful, and that the key to helping these patients lay in meeting them where they are.

The concept of the shadow in Jung’s work refers to the parts of our psyche that lie outside of our conscious awareness, and which contain the traits and characteristics we have not been able to claim. An important task at beginning the individuation process lies in exploring and integrating parts of one’s shadow (though it can never be eradicated— Jung believed that the more conscious we become, in fact, the more our shadow continues to grow to match it!).

Neurodivergent individuals, by definition, have a more difficult time conforming to the expectations placed on them by society. Many of them learn to mask, or to compensate in ways that are ultimately costly for their own bodies and souls. We tend to praise these individuals when they “succeed” at normative tasks, not recognizing that we are denying an essential part of their psyche. For this reason, these individuals may carry an especially large shadow. This can be especially true in high performers— like myself— who have convinced themselves, through the “triple bind,” that they are inherently flawed.

Meeting ourselves where we are

This is why it is so critical for helping professionals— or even just those of us who want to be better humans— to excavate our own internalized biases. What do we think is “normal,” and are we expecting others to adhere to those expectations? Can we be humble enough to say, I don’t know what this person’s path is, rather than judging or feeling hurt by them when they fail to meet our own standards?

I’ve chosen to use both Jung’s work and the NARM model in my client work because both offer de-pathologizing schemas for addressing our complexes. Each has a compassionate lens for recognizing that outer circumstances frame our experience, while respecting the individual’s innate capacity to grow and change. What is essential in both (in my opinion) is that the helping professional set aside any personal agenda beyond supporting the client. The less we have resolved our own discomfort around our own neurodivergence, or our bodies1, the more likely we may be to stand in the way of their progress. Yet there’s room for growth, here, too— Jung saw the therapeutic relationship as being beneficial for both parties, saying, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

I don’t often claim my “neurodivergent” label— perhaps because of my own complexes around the idea— but the truth is that I have struggled my entire life to both accept myself as I am, and to assimilate to societal standards. This is an impossible task. When I hear my clients describe themselves as “too sensitive,” or “having a very gentle nervous system,” I listen for the implicit self-criticism that I know often accompanies these revelations, and I ask them to tell me about it.

It’s not easy being green. I have lost friends who cannot understand why I can’t spend as much time together as they needed (because I need so very, very much time alone). I have to guard myself against overstimulation, or I get physically ill. I suck at small talk. And after a day of working with groups at work, I will toss and turn all night as my system attempts to process all of the social/emotional information that it wasn’t able to digest. But this “too sensitive,” “gentle” system, is a miraculous instrument. It helps me tune in to others in a way that I am so grateful for. It allows me to have numinous, sensory experiences of joy and love. It let me sit down and write this piece in one sitting, because when I am passionate and focused, I cannot be stopped.

In planning this piece, I shared some of my childhood memories with my partner. “All I ever wanted to do was be home with my dog,” I said, wistfully. He laughed. “So, not much has changed.”

This, actually, is the essence of individuation. We were never lost. We were just waiting to come home."

There are many ways to conceptualize exactly why so many of us are feeling exhausted, burnt-out, depressed, and anxious, in this particular cultural moment that we’re facing.

One way to understand it is that we find ourselves caught up in what is called a “double bind;” a particular kind of psychological dilemma that takes a tremendous toll on our nervous systems.

A “double bind” refers to a situation in which:

• You face two conflicting demands,

• You cannot satisfy both,

• You cannot leave the situation; and

• You cannot even name the bind without making it worse.

A classic example of the double bind is a gay adolescent living in a fundamentalist household. Their need for parental love and acceptance is in direct conflict with their need to live authentically (two conflicting demands, neither of which can be satisfied). They are dependent on their family for support (they cannot leave the situation). To name the bind (coming out) is unthinkable (it would only make the bind worse).

In the language of complex trauma, this particular kind of double bind is called "the core dilemma.” It’s the deepest kind of existential crisis: the impossible choice between authenticity and belonging. We cannot be our truest selves without risking the love and connection we need. To adopt an acceptable persona means that we receive love for being someone we are not. It’s a heartbreaking situation: we long for something that feels perpetually out of reach.

As a result of this dilemma, our very needs become threatening. If needing things leads to pain, rejection, or abandonment, we must shut down the needs themselves. We cut ourselves off, developing strategies to numb, disconnect, or disappear from a reality that has become too painful to inhabit.

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The physiological cost of the double bind

The lived experience of the double bind has a distinct effect on our bodies. Trying to meet two competing demands is like having one foot on the brake, and one foot on the gas. An endlessly revving engine, our nervous system flooded with stress hormones, we can feel like we’re in fight, flight, and freeze all at the same time.

Some individuals experience this as a literal split in the body: one half moving forward, the other backward; a complex twist of bones, muscles, and fascia that has us reaching out for support at the same time we retreat from the threat of that connection. Others experience this as body twitches, nausea, or total systemic shutdown.

To live out the core dilemma costs a tremendous amount of psychic AND physiological energy: it drains our life force, leaving us exhausted and second-guessing ourselves: I just can’t get it right.

Patriarchy and the double bind

My personal anthem for the double bind is Lola Young’s 2025 hit “Messy”:

“‘Cause I’m too messy, and then I’m too f*cking clean
You told me, “Get a job,” then you ask where the hell I’ve been
And I’m too perfect ‘til I open my big mouth
I want to be me, is that not allowed?
And I’m too clever, and then I’m too f*cking dumb
You hate it when I cry, unless it’s that time of the month
And I’m too perfect ‘til I show you that I’m not
A thousand people I could be for you, and you hate the f*cking lot.”

—Lola Young, “Messy”

If you’ve never heard it, I really recommend a listen— it’s incredibly catchy, and her plaintive growl gives it a resonance words alone can’t capture. Most importantly, her lyrics point to something that I believe all marginalized identities can relate to: under patriarchy, there is no acceptable way to be yourself. Beauty standards are literally impossible; if we somehow manage to come close to achieving them, we are “trying too hard,” we’ve “had too much work done,” or we’re now “dangerously thin.”

Because this hierarchy of worth is based on a system that prioritizes white male bodies, all other bodies are inherently problematic.There is no way to be authentic and to be valued. As the saying goes, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of patriarchy: the double bind is baked in.

The cultural “core dilemma”

On the collective level, the double bind is so much a part of our daily lives, it’s rendered almost invisible. Worse, like a child caught in the core dilemma, we’ve started to accept that our basic needs will not be met:

• Trust: We want to trust, but trust has been weaponized (et tu, Cesar Chavez?)

• Connection: I need community but community feels dangerous.

• Safety: I need to feel safe but safety feels naive.

• Expression: I want to be seen, but being seen feels increasingly risky.

• Agency: I need to feel like I matter, but the system is so big— how can I make a difference?

This double bind underlies our collective exhaustion. We’re living under the impossible weight of a situation in which every move costs something, and no move feels like enough.

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Loosening the bind

This cultural double bind is so immensely powerful because it hijacks a neuropsychological system that is common to all mammals— our attachment system. We have a basic need for love and belonging that is wired into us for survival; we carry this with us from infancy into our adulthood.

Yet individuals who have lived with complex trauma— which include those who have learned to live with marginalized identities in a patriarchal system— already know the secret to escaping the double bind: it must be named. By definition, talking about the double bind feels dangerous. That discomfort is part of what keeps us tied in its knots.

The image of the 8 of Swords from the Smith-Rider-Waite Tarot deck provides a compelling visual for the secret to escaping the double bind. These bonds are looser than they appear; freedom is more accessible than we’ve allowed ourselves to believe. The means to our escape are close at hand.

Naming the bind, as Young does in the song quoted above (“I’m too messy, and then I’m too f*cking clean”), highlights its sheer absurdity. The game is rigged. We don’t have to play this game at all; we can find another way.

But in order to see this— like the image in the card above— we must remove our own blindfold and reclaim our own power.

Jung’s individuation process

Addressing the double bind in which we find ourselves, collectively, is an unprecedented opportunity for both individual and collective change. The hypocrisy of our institutions is being unveiled publicly; our heroes are falling from their pedestals. As one of my clients recently observed: “If people can’t see the truth now, it’s because they really, really don’t want to.”

The question is — what do we do with this knowledge? Do we put the blindfold back on and stay tied in our comfortable knots? Or do we begin to work with this tension in a way that generates something genuinely new — for ourselves, and for our culture?

Jung called this the process of individuation: the lifelong, often uncomfortable work of becoming who we actually are, rather than who we were told to be.

“It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of ‘isms,’ and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible.”

— C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

For some of us — particularly those who have never been well served by the dominant culture’s collective identities — this recognition may come more easily. When the system was never designed for you, you learn earlier that its promises are hollow. And yet even then, abandoning our old ways of operating can be surprisingly difficult. Familiar binds have a comfort to them, however painful.

This is part of what makes this particular moment so disorienting. The blindfold is being torn off. We are being asked to recognize this double bind before we would have chosen to on our own. For many of us, this revelation is truly destabilizing. Yet it is also, in Jung’s framework, exactly the kind of disruption that makes real growth possible. We finally get “to be me,” with all the authenticity and responsibility that that entails.

Questions for personal contemplation

If you’d like a prompt to work with this, my invitation to you is to ask yourself the following:

• Is the double bind familiar from my own childhood, or history?

• Where do I feel that double bind now (review the list above- trust, connection, safety, expression, agency)?

• What feels “impossible?”

• Is it possible that there is another way for me?

• Notice what your experience is as you work with these. Do you feel tired? Defeated? Excited? Anxious? How might that response be reinforcing the bind itself?

• Think of a mentor or figure who was able to overcome a double bind— James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, Viktor Frankl— what inspires you about them? How can you relate their work to your own life?

“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.”

—C.G. Jung, The Shadow

In the past few years, I’ve noticed something interesting emerging in conversations with colleagues and in the sharing circles of workshops.

We’ll start to quote someone, or mention a body of work we love, and then we hesitate. I don’t know that much about him,we hedge. I mean, I haven’t vetted EVERYTHING she’s done.

Where it once felt easy to cite a writer or discuss their ideas, we now pause mid-sentence. Did I hear there was abuse in his community? Are these theories based on solid science? Has this been debunked? Was he in the Epstein files? Didn’t she say something antisemitic once?

The rise of “cancel culture,” for better or worse, has made us more attuned than ever to the possibility that our heroes have feet of clay. And the internet is not helping. It’s full of people screaming into the void about how everyone else is wrong — and even my carefully tended Substack feed is ripe with snark and smugness. Writers eager to inform me that polyvagal theory is junk science, IFS is dangerous, Deepak Chopra is a hypocrite, and the body-positive movement is dead.

Each new revelation is another collapse. Another writer, another teacher, another healer — another fall from grace. Something darker, more cynical, starts to creep in. Who can we trust? What is still sacred? Where, exactly, is the good?

That must be one charismatic frog

What is it about certain authority figures that makes us “fall” for them? Why do we get “swept away” by certain individuals, or systems, or beliefs? How do we find ourselves “hooked,” “caught up,” “captured?” Why on earth would we want to kiss this metaphorical frog — and what makes us so certain they’re a prince?

The language we use to describe these experiences is worth pausing on. We fall for someone. We get swept away. We are caught and captured — as though by a current, or a trap, or a spell. Notice what all of these phrases have in common: the self is passive. Something is happening to us. Our volition has quietly left the building.

Throughout my career as a coach, yoga student, teacher, and studio owner, I’ve known a lot of charismatic wellness professionals. Their personality is immediately attractive in some way– they speak the right jargon, they dress the right way, they have very white teeth. In meeting them, you might think, “man, I want some of that.” Some of them have a gift for seeming to see into your soul, or to talk to your innermost desires.

Sometimes, in the yoga world, they call this kind of charisma “shakti,” which is a Sanskrit word that (in one sense, at least) means “power.” It can seem as though we’ve fallen under their spell.

Yoga teachers who carry this kind of power can do more than mesmerize with their presence — they can guide students into poses, experiences, and states of surrender that would be unimaginable otherwise. This is the gift of the mana figure. It is also, as two infamous examples make painfully clear, where things can go very wrong. (Please be aware that the following links contain graphic accounts of sexual assault: Bikram Choudhury and Pattabhi Jois.)

In Jungian psychology, a mana figure is an archetypal image of extraordinary power, wisdom, or authority — the kind of person who seems to carry something beyond the ordinary. The word mana comes from Melanesian and Polynesian cultures, where it refers to a sacred, impersonal force that can inhabit people or objects.

Mana figures appear both in dreams and in waking life — as the wise old man, the great mother, the guru, the healer, the prophet. They are figures onto whom we project our own unlived potential for wisdom, strength, and wholeness. When we encounter someone who carries this quality for us — a teacher, a therapist, a spiritual leader — we are often responding not just to who they actually are, but to what they represent in the deeper layers of the psyche.

The danger Jung identified is what he called mana inflation — the moment when either the person receiving the projection begins to believe they actually are the mana figure, or when the one projecting loses themselves entirely in devotion to it. Both are forms of psychological possession.

We see the world as we are

“Strictly speaking, projection is never made; it happens, it is simply there. In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is my own.”

— C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Projection isn’t a pathology — it’s a fundamental feature of the psyche, the mechanism by which we develop, relate, and find ourselves in one another. It is how the inner world reaches toward the outer one. We are all doing it, all the time.

In one sense, we never really see each other at all. We are each projecting onto the other our own hopes and fears, our history, our unique constellation of ideas about the world and ourselves. As Anaïs Nin wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Perhaps you can recall your first encounter with a figure who would turn out to matter. That friend who would prove so challenging. The romantic partner who took a piece of your heart when they left. The actress who always inexplicably mesmerized you. The pet who reminded you of the childhood dog your mother never let you have.

When we feel that magnetic pull — that je ne sais quoi, that ineffable spark, a sense of karma or destiny — we know that something especially powerful is in play. A projection has found its hook.

Our shadow, our “missing piece”

“A projection rises from a neglected but dynamic value within us; usually it is essentially unconscious, but has a certain energy, which, when we have not attended it consciously, escapes repression and enters the world as a hope, a project, an agenda, a fantasy, or a renewal of expectation. No one rises in the morning and says, ‘I will make a projection today,’ but we all do. What is unconscious, charged with meaning, as a certain dynamic autonomy, and is denied inwardly will appear in some guise in our external environment.”

— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

What we see in the other is a fascinating mystery. We are projecting something we have not yet consciously claimed in ourselves — what Hollis calls “a neglected but dynamic value within us.”

We feel ourselves to be incomplete. Like the protagonist in Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece, we sense that something essential is absent — and we go looking for it in the world.

But what feels missing can never be found externally. It is a part of ourselves that was denied, repressed, or never allowed to be fully claimed — projected outward as “the missing piece” when it was never truly gone. These unintegrated parts live in what Jung called the shadow: the rich, unmapped territory of the unacknowledged self.

We can catch a glimpse of our own shadow more easily than we might think. Ask someone who their favorite public figure is — and their least favorite. Listen to what infuriates them about that neighbor, or what they love most in their closest friend. The qualities we most admire and most despise in others are almost always the ones we have never allowed ourselves to fully own.

To say this plainly:

Our heroes and our villains are reflections of our own unacknowledged qualities.

We kiss the frog because we’ve projected our own lost royalty onto its warts.

We see in others what we have never allowed ourselves to become.

You guys, this prince is just a frog

In 2026, as we find ourselves at a global crisis point, the loss of our luminaries can feel especially painful. The spell is broken, and we find ourselves gazing at yet another frog— but our disillusionment is just projection coming home.

The withdrawal of a projection is a powerful, pivotal moment. All of the psychic energy we’ve invested in the Other rushes back to us — immediate, physical, felt in the body before it’s understood by the mind. It might be the gut-punch of betrayal, a flood of grief, or red-hot burning rage.

“Every failed projection is experienced by the ego as a frustration and a defeat,” Hollis tells us. But then he asks the question that changes everything:

“What are we going to do with that quantum of energy, that agenda of growth or regression?”

In other words — where is our power now? Where in ourselves live the qualities we’d placed in the Other? What did I love or admire about this person, this system, this community? Where have I denied myself these qualities — or been denied them? And where, now, might I begin to cultivate them in myself?

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You’re still a princess- don’t turn yourself into a frog

“Who would not be drawn to a missing part of their psychological life, for that is what a projection carries, and who has not felt the power of this phenomenon? (No wonder the phrase ‘soul mate’ has become such a cliché, for aspects of our soul are involved — but we can mistakenly think we actually see them in the other.)”

— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

For those of us with trauma histories, the moment a projection crumbles can be especially generative — or especially dangerous. Rather than meeting the situation with curiosity, many of us turn the collapse inward. We blame ourselves for having “fallen” again. We reach for the familiar comfort of shame.

This always happens to me. I’m the common denominator. I should have known better.

No matter what your shame says: it is never wrong to see good in others. It is not naïve to hope that people will behave ethically, or to go looking for good in the world. And if someone took advantage of that projection — if they used your trust against you — that is not a failure of your discernment. It is never your fault that someone else chose to cause harm.

And Jung was clear on this point — projection doesn’t land randomly. It needs a hook. Something real in the other that invites it, that makes the projection feel true. Which means that what you saw in them was not a hallucination. The good you perceived was real. It simply was not the whole story.

Every failed projection is a defeat for the ego — but a necessary one.

As we learn to recognize, reclaim, and integrate what we’ve projected outward, we become more whole. We need to place less of ourselves in others. We begin to see people as they actually are — not as missing pieces of ourselves, not as princes hiding inside frogs, but as the fully complex, contradictory, beautifully limited human beings they have always been. With that energy returned to us, we become less reactive, more grounded — better resourced for the work we are actually here to do.

PS. Reminder that we are three weeks away from the “Better Breathing for Trauma” series that begins April 4. Read more and register here!

Last week I talked about the importance of recognizing our stressors— and how they can affect us— before we simply start throwing “feel-better” techniques at ourselves. Paradoxical though it may seem, simply acknowledging the reality of our situation can have a settling effect on our system.

That doesn’t mean that using breathing techniques can’t be helpful. As I mentioned in last week’s post, breathing is the only function of the autonomic nervous system over which we have conscious control. This makes it a powerful mechanism to dial down an overactive nervous system, or in working with trauma symptoms when they arise.

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The technique that I share in the video below is a good one to use, as my colleague says, “anytime the breath feels out of control.” One of my clients has found it to be a good resource in working with panic attacks as they arise. I learned it myself from Jennifer as part of my own breath retraining process, which helped me to lower my overall experience of anxiety.

As with any technique, remember that if it doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you— each of us respond differently to different interventions. Consider it an exploration and see what you find!

Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message with any thoughts or questions.

Both Jennifer and I have found that there are so many ways to work with anxiety, stress, and the body-based effects of trauma without even talking about the sources of that anxiety or stress (although that can be a part of the process, too). If you’re curious to know more, we’ll be sharing more information and practical strategies in next month’s Better Breathing for Trauma series. Whether you’re a human who lives with anxiety, or someone who supports other humans in a therapeutic way, our intention is to help you understand how stress lives in our posture and breathing patterns, and how we can shift our experience from the inside out.

Triumph over nature?

This morning marks the beginning of Daylight Savings Time here in the US. My body is not fooled. It knows what time it feels like. And yet, if I want to participate in society, I must override that instinctual knowing and move forward in my day, minus one hour.

Jung said,

“…(T)riumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure.” —CG Jung, “The Eros Theory,” CW 7

Nature cannot long be tricked, reasoned with, overridden, or dominated.

But boy, do we love to try. My social media feed is chock-full of suggestions for ways to “optimize” or “hack” our way into better health, from supplements to mindfulness interventions. As I said in the post below, much of this messaging is based in shame and fear, appealing to our deepest desire to be loved and accepted. Sadly, ultimately, most of these approaches are doomed, because they fail to acknowledge what Jung knew: the human body, the human psyche, cannot be dominated, but must be treated with “tolerance and wise measure.” Not as easy to sell.

Everyone wants to be regulated

Nowhere is this rule— that nature cannot long be held back— more true than when we are talking about our survival instincts. Our deepest animal need is to stay alive— a neurobiological drive that is always in play, no matter how “safe” our logical minds may tell us we are.

Our systems never cease scanning for potential threats, and preparing to respond to them. At the first sign of danger, we shift into our sympathetic nervous system. Our adrenal glands release epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Our heart rate and blood pressure increase; our pupils dilate to improve vision. Our “non-essential” systems— immune, digestive and reproductive— pause as blood flow is directed to our muscles. At the same time, our breathing becomes faster and more shallow.

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What an incredible life-saving system this is! Yet it has become the bane of our modern existence, largely because for many of us, our sympathetic nervous system is stuck in the “on” position. Not only do we live in a time of unrelenting stress, we each carry a history of past threats that our systems recognize, and respond to. But because we fail to understand— let alone respect— its purpose, we treat it as a nuisance, a flaw. We call it “dysregulation,” and we are so desperate to get ourselves “regulated” again, to “reset the nervous system,” that we will often try anything to make that happen.

Paradoxically, if we could find a way to work with our biology, instead of fighting it, we’d have a better chance of naturally down-shifting back into the parasympathetic nervous system.

Have you tried taking a few deep breaths

Breathing plays a key role in bringing our system back into balance. Because it is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that we can actively control, we often use it as an access point. And that can be quite helpful.

Many of you have probably already learned some basic breathing techniques, from “take a deep breath” to “box breathing” or “lengthen your exhales.” These can be quite helpful, in certain contexts. But for some of us— and in some other contexts— you may have noticed that these techniques don’t always work the way we want them to.

One of the reasons (and I think it’s a big one, actually) is that trying to impose an external breathing pattern on a system that’s already in high alert is a lot like someone telling you to “just calm down” when you’re panicking.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found that to be helpful.

Your nervous system is smarter than you think

Remember that our breathing— along with our entire nervous system— is designed to respond to perceived external stressors. That’s a feature, not a bug. If your breath doesn’t change in response to a threat, you’ve got much bigger problems. The deeper truth is that sometimes we need to change something else before the breath itself can change.

Creating a greater sense of stability and safety is the simplest thing we can do to help someone else shift their breathing patterns or move out of fight-or-flight, but we often miss this step because we don’t know how to do it.

Here’s the biggest nervous system hack of all: acknowledging that the situation is stressful or feels dangerous can be helpful in settling our system.

If you think back to a time that you were with someone who validated your feelings, or where you felt deeply seen, and understood, you already know this truth. When someone mirrors our inner world, we feel less isolated and fearful. Our system automatically settles and our breath shifts itself.

Many of my clients are individuals who have spent their lives knowing or seeing truths others did not (as in the Cassandra complex— see below). They experienced gaslighting from their family system, or their culture (as many folks in marginalized identities do when the cultural narrative fails to match their lived experience).

Trauma survivors experience this in a profound way, especially when family secrets are involved. Their body knows a truth that others’ do not, yet it is consistently denied by everyone around them. The situation is further complicated when the individual learns to deny their own truth, effectively gaslighting themselves, in an attempt to resolve their existential tension.

“Taking a deep breath” isn’t going to get it, y’all.

For these individuals, simply acknowledging the reality of the situation can have a profound settling effect.

What it means to be seen

By saying to others, or ourselves:

• “I believe you.”

• “It’s not wrong to feel what you feel.”

• “It makes sense that you’re having this experience.”

We take away the extra layer of shame and anxiety that accompanies the threat.

Sometimes, there’s an instant feeling of relief that translates into a more “regulated” system. For others, who’ve never had their needs mirrored, it can take much longer to trust the experience. Over time, this process establishes a sense of self-trust and agency that feels more stable and safe-- even though external circumstances have not changed.

When “hacks” become “accidental gaslighting”

If we are always telling ourselves, or our clients, that they need to change their breath when they appear anxious, we are unconsciously denying their reality. We’re communicating to our system that it will not be supported in the crisis it’s experiencing. No matter how good our intentions are, it can feel like we’re saying, “you’re wrong, you’re wrong” every time anxiety appears.

What about “irrational fears,” you’re wondering? When you— or someone else— “shouldn’t” be afraid? The same rules apply. Each of us has our own triggers and reasons for feeling threatened. Nobody gets anxious “for no reason.”

By acknowledging and listening to the underlying pattern, we provide space for that pattern to shift on its own, rather than trying to force it into compliance before it’s ready.

Breathing techniques can still be useful

That doesn’t mean that there’s not a place for breathing techniques— they’re a critical part of re-establishing a greater felt sense of safety in our bodies, and we’ve got some great things to share with you in next month’s webinar series— but it’s important to know what they can and cannot do.

Breathing techniques:

• Cannot override a deep core belief that something is wrong;

• Will not change the reality of external circumstances, or the inner truths we live with;

• Are not a substitute for a felt sense of safety and stability in our bodies.

Before we attempt to create change in our bodies or souls, we must first acknowledge the reality of the situation as we experience it. Until we do, any new strategy will never stick. We must, as Jung said, give Nature the “tolerance and wise measure” she requires.

“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love…. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

—James Baldwin, “Where Do We Go From Here?”1

Sometimes, when I sit down to write this weekly letter, I feel a kind of wild despair. How do I get these thoughts and feelings out of my head and into some kind of organized shape? How can I translate these abstract blobs of experience into a language that expresses something clearly?

As I sat here this morning staring at this screen (and then again, off into space), it occurs to me that my personal struggle mirrors the larger issue humanity is facing: how do we bring our two split halves back together?

I’m not speaking here necessarily of the political Far Left and the Far Right (though we will see that they do line up rather nicely), but of the masculine and the feminine principles that should be balanced in each of us: Eros and Logos.

Eros is less verbal. It relates to the body, love, relatedness, abstraction. It uses our right-hemisphere brain; it values feeling; it sees the big picture. It is potentiality, and the principle of connectedness.

Logos, the masculine principle, has to do with the mind, power, discernment, clarity and directedness. It is left-hemisphere thinking, seeing in details and parts. It is the principle of force.

The act of writing— like any creative act, like conception itself!— requires both principles in equal measure.

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Power out of balance

“Where love reigns, there is no will to power, and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.”

—CG Jung, CW 7, par. 78, “The Problem of the Attitude-Type”2

We are living in a time where the principle of power is dominant. Where a blatant lie can take precedence over a truth; where the tools of technology are used to alter the reality of our lives. Where wars and divisiveness are the norm, and relationality and compassion are decried. A man held the door for me the other day at a local store. Our eyes met, and I smiled as I thanked him, before glancing down at his shirt. “Wokeness leads to weakness,” it said. Power split from love.

Carol Gilligan (whose groundbreaking work demonstrates how young boys are taught to be “heroic,” detached and unempathetic, while young girls learn to be selfless and nurturing), explains that

“If you want to elevate one group of people over another, you have to undercut our relational capacities as human beings. You have to stop the person at the top from feeling empathy for the people at the bottom.”3

How familiar this feels.

Love and power together

“(C)ultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first.”

—CG Jung, CW 10, par. 329, “Civilization in Transition.”4

It’s unusual for me to write so much about Eros— I tend to focus on cultivating power, Logos. This is because for myself— and for many of my clients, and readers— Eros is already predominant. Instead, it is our power that lives in our personal shadow, which needs to be reclaimed so we can become more whole.

This is critical work: as Baldwin says, “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” To simply lament how evil the “other” is without addressing our own imbalance is nothing short of hypocritical.

At the same time, in the larger culture, it is the principle of Logos that has been dominant— and yet, Eros is pushing back in a way that is clearly threatening.

Take, for example, the 2026 US Super Bowl Half Time show— an event so threatening to white patriarchy that an alternative had to be provided. The performance itself was Eros on full display: art, music, multicultural expression, intergenerational connection, and that clear sign, stating simply, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The statement itself, though, is paradoxical. According to our definition of Eros, love on its own is not power. It is relationship, connection, and creative potential. The Super Bowl Half Time show was such an impactful experience not due to Eros alone, but because it combined the power of Logos— planning, organization, direction, purpose, thinking— with the connecting, feeling relationality of Eros. The same is true of the Minnesota anti-ICE protests. Eros alone cannot effect change. The Beatles said, “All you need is love,” but in truth, we need power combined with our love to generate something new.

I like the way James Hollis suggests we think about this for ourselves:

“(R)egardless of one’s sexual identity, we all have two tasks: nurturance and empowerment, whether you’re female or male. You have to always be asking yourself, what nurtures me? What feeds me and supports my journey and what opposes it? And secondly, what is my empowerment? How do I get permission and the courage to risk taking my life into the world and engaging that risk?”5

Protecting oneself from emotional contagion

In Buddhism, Eros and Logos could be seen as the concepts of “emptiness” and “clarity.” Emptiness refers to the fact that all phenomena are inherently non-existent, pure potential. Clarity means that anything can arise within that potential. Eros and Logos could also be stated as prajna (wisdom, feminine) and upaya (method, masculine). The union of the two is shown as syzygy, yab-yum, two deities in union. Images like this one helped Jung to arrive at his conceptualization of the two principles.

Mingyur Rinpoche, my primary Buddhist teacher, frequently says, “the best protection is no protection needed.” Perhaps he means by this that when we understand that reality is inherently empty, and that anything can arise within it— your most heartfelt wish, or your deepest fears— we no longer need to grasp so tightly to our sense of safety. And when we understand ourselves as dynamic beings, an ever-fluctuating interplay of masculine and feminine, endlessly creating new possibility with one another, we can both take ourselves less seriously, and recognize the potential impact of our actions in an interdependent world.

There is no opportunity to stand apart from the rising tide of danger we are in as a species. We can attempt to avoid the news, or social media, but simply leaving our house or picking up our phone subjects us to the swirl of others’ anxieties and fears. If we are ourselves uncertain, we are more vulnerable to emotional contagion, getting swept up in mass emotions we never intended.

“The best protection" we can find is to cultivate an awareness of ourselves, especially that which lies in our own shadow. By growing familiar with those less comfortable, younger, awkward parts of ourselves, we become more whole. We are less fearful. We are more effective agents for change.

The questions Hollis suggests above are a good starting point:

• What nurtures me? What needs me and supports my journey, and what opposes it?

• What is my empowerment? How do I get permission and the courage to risk taking my life into the world and engaging that risk?

I look forward to hearing where this takes you.

Until next time!

xo,

Laura

The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing.

—CG Jung

On June 27, 2022, I had the following dream:

My teeth are breaking and falling out. At first, I could kind of put them back in, and they would stay in place if I was careful (this has worked in past dreams), but this time they just kept coming apart. I had a handful of broken grey teeth. I showed my brother’s ex gf-- I was a little hysterical. I made an appointment with a dentist to put in false teeth because previous repairs obviously had not worked. The feeling is terror, and also shame.

The day before, I had taken a train to Miami, where I met with a Postural Restoration coach. PRI was a modality I’d been incorporating in my practice for the past 18 months. Its emphasis on rebalancing the human body’s inherent asymmetry had helped several of my clients with all kinds of symptoms, from chronic heartburn to low back pain. But I wasn’t getting the results I was looking for in my own body, so I needed some help.

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The coach I met tested me thoroughly and gave me several exercises to work on until our next session. The most memorable part, though, was when she told me, casually, to “click your back left molars every once in a while” as I was doing an exercise. I was stymied. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You know,” she said. “Have your top left molars touch your bottom left molars. Don’t clench, just make them touch.” She paused, seeing my face. “Oh,” she said. “Can’t you do that?”

Panic washed over me. Those teeth were nowhere near touching each other. I had read about the importance of molar occlusion in the PRI research— something I’d never heard anywhere else— but I’d somehow managed to ignore this glaring issue in my own body. In fact, none of my top teeth touched ANY of my bottom teeth— they never had.

Who cares about molar occlusion anyway

I’d always thought I was fortunate to avoid having braces as an adolescent. I never loved my smile, but it wasn’t something that I obsessed over. My teeth just didn’t feel like a big deal.

What I didn’t know— consciously, anyway— is that having proper “molar occlusion”— the ability to touch your molars to each other— provides the brain with an essential sense of safety and grounding.

If you take a look at my pre-braces teeth, you can see that my teeth were nowhere close to touching:

In my case, this meant that I was consistently clenching my jaw, trying to get some kind of contact, resulting in the deep overbite you see here.

It is not at all common knowledge, even among personal trainers, or physical therapists, but molar occlusion is critical for stability. These teeth play a proprioceptive role— helping our brain and body to understand where they are in space. Failure to achieve that contact means that our muscles will have to work in different, less optimal, patterns to stabilize our bodies.

This is why my chronically stiff neck, pinching hips, and limited range of motion weren’t something that I was able to “fix” on my own, because they stemmed from my brain’s existential need to find stability and safety in the absence of the molar contact it was looking for.

Teeth aren’t the only critical stability point (though they may be the most unexpected one). Feet are also key players. Our brain’s ability to sense heel and big toe contact are another commonly-missed issue, along with rib cage placement— when the rib cage is too far forward, our shoulder blades don’t have a good point of contact to rest on, creating more existential angst for our whole system.

Vision, too, is another huge component that is frequently overlooked. I’ve seen many cases where simply changing footwear, getting a new glasses prescription, or even just chewing gum (getting that molar contact!) took a person’s pain away instantly. All this time the brain was just waiting to get the feedback it needed to feel safe enough.

In my own case, the chronic hip, foot pain, and neck pain that I’d lived with for so long had failed to respond to all of the interventions I’d tried because my brain wasn’t able to sense “ground.” And it wasn’t until I found a physical therapist who was trained in both Postural Restoration and Applied Integration techniques that I was able to begin the three-year process of moving my teeth into the proper position to establish the contact I needed.1

The unbearable lightness of being ungrounded

Western medicine has created an artificial dichotomy between mental and physical health. I feel incredibly fortunate to have entered into the mental health field through the physical work I’ve done; it gives me a tremendous advantage in better understanding how and why people are suffering.

For example, individuals who struggle to know where they are in space— who feel “ungrounded”— are often likely to experience anxiety. In the case of hypermobile persons, we can provide tools and training to help them to experience their bodies differently. These individuals benefit from more feedback in their bodies— Therabands, blocks or balls between the knees, weighted blankets. This frees up bandwidth in their brain so that they can literally breathe more easily, engage more economical muscle patterns, and even enjoy the experience of being alive more.

@laura.beth.wenger

Laura Beth Wenger on Instagram: "Dissociation during physical i…

For an individual who has trouble finding ground through their feet or teeth, like me, wearing shoes with enough of a heel cup or arch support for their brain to sense where their feet are in space can be enough to free up their range of motion. I can tell you that in my own body, although I love the natural feel of barefoot shoes, I cannot turn my neck very far while wearing them, and my calves will be exhausted after a short walk. Ironically, in “barefoot” shoes, my brain can’t sense the ground; my body has to work a lot harder to keep me “safe.”

This experience of being ungrounded in our bodies is a physiological nudge toward dissociation; a “lightness” that may feel pleasant and airy, at times (my physical therapist, Amy, said to me once, “you walk like you’re about to float off the ground!”)— but which is, overall, less present, less reality-based, and perhaps less able to cope with the needs of our time. As we’ve seen above, if we do not feel stable, we cannot effectively use our full range of strength and movement. The best we can do is brace ourselves.

Beyond body & mind: symbol 🦷

The last time I saw my grandmother, a few years before her death, she was chewing a piece of candy when a confused and sad look dropped over her face. She spat a broken tooth into her hand, and held it out to show me. The aching feeling of this sudden, almost terrifying loss— that tooth, once strong, now broken and useless— flooded me, an echo of my own recurring dream of broken teeth.

The Book of Symbols says of teeth,

“Symbolically, teeth represent a kind of individual psychic mill where what’s too rough to take in directly can be ground up by conscious consideration, digested and metabolized. Teeth also evoke other aspects of aggression…. Losing teeth is a common image in dreams, often bringing to awareness conflict around assertively grasping and integrating an aspect of life one needs to claim, or a compromised capacity for aggression in general. Or it may depict a state of anxiety, a fear of of affective disintegration, that one ‘can’t hold it all together.’”2

Whitmont and Perera, in their classic Dreams, A Portal to the Source, suggest that dreams of “(l)osing teeth may refer to the loss of a particular reality adaptation, hopefully to be replaced by new ones or prostheses.”3

What did these ongoing,dread-filled dreams of losing my teeth mean for me? Up until this point, I was not consciously aware that my teeth did not touch in the way they were “meant” to. I couldn’t, then, know that this was contributing to an overall sense of untethered-ness, an accidental, existential anxiety that stiffened my joints and constricted my breath. But my psyche knew. It communicated my distress to me quite clearly.

Dream symbols aren’t always so direct, but this is a reminder that in cases where they point directly to a somatic (body-based) experience, we may want to ask: is there something literal to consider here?

My dream journal tells me that I have not had this recurring dream since 2024, when I regained my molar contact. It wasn’t perfect— and I continued to have chronic neck and foot pain while I wore braces, and then while wearing Invisaligns (which prevent the natural contact the brain craves). But I had enough contact that my body and psyche could start to trust their experience more. I have more range of motion in my neck (even as I write this, I’m marveling at how far I can turn my head from side to side!). I don’t limp when I get out of bed in the morning anymore.

And I no longer dream that my teeth are crumbling in my mouth.

Jung’s “psychoid realm”

“Practical medicine is and has always been an art, and the same is true of practical analysis. True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide.”

—C.G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928)

What do we do with this kind of knowledge? How should we understand this case study of my teeth, my dreams, and the anxiety that underlay, or coexisted with, both?

One of the more esoteric parts of Jungian psychology is what he termed the psychoid realm— a level of reality in which mind and matter are not differentiated. This is why, if our system is unbalanced, we may experience symptoms as physiological (foot pain); mental (anxiety); or, on the psychoid level itself, symbolic (the dream).

Conceptualizing our bodies and psyches as a holistic system rather than separate realms of experience, we are better positioned to understand three things:

1. All symptoms can be seen as attempts to restore order to an imbalanced system

2. We may need more than one practitioner— it might take a team— to address the imbalance, but most importantly,

3. The client themselves holds the answers, though they will need support in decoding them.

In this light, there is not one right answer, nor even, necessarily, one right methodology, for each client; the process of seeking the answers may be more curative as the final “answer” itself. Exploring my own “grounding,” metaphorically and literally, has been an archetypal experience; one of the “hero’s journeys” of my lifetime; a sacred rite of passage back to “ground.”

This is, as Jung says, “the miracle of the living soul.” It cannot be reduced to simple theories, but must be lived as “true art,” a “creative, individual” act.

“It is hard for me to follow those who are not experiencing satisfaction in their lives. So much of our ability to be satisfied gets co-opted, manipulated, by other people, by institutions, by systems, that say satisfaction isn’t real, the only thing that matters is survival.”

—Prentis Hemphill, Finding Our Way podcast

Over the past month or so, we’ve been exploring the landscape of the human nervous system. If you want to catch up, you can read about the Window of Capacity here and, for those unicorns who don’t adhere to simple rules, the “Faux Window” of Capacity here.

All of this begs the question— if we ARE stuck in a perpetual state of activation (or, on the flip side, a low-energy state of disconnection)— “What are we supposed to do about it?”

I remember asking a similar question. There was a time, when I was running the yoga studio, that my stress level was so consistently high that my nerves were always jangling. The slightest thing-- a car horn at a traffic light, an unexpected text-- would run through me like a gun shot.

I’d also lost the ability to access any kind of normal range of emotions. At one particular low point, cleaning up after a final evening class, I walked into the front lobby and found an especially disgusting mound of trash spilling out of the bin. Instead of sighing, rolling my eyes, or saying, “oh God, now this,” I found myself reflexively smiling at the trash. Yes, dear reader, you read that right. I actually flashed a fake smile to the trash can because I had trained my system to deal with unpleasant people, tasks, work, with a big old smile to hide my emotional exhaustion. At that moment, standing alone in a yoga studio, smiling at the garbage, I thought, “Holy shit. I have got to change something.”

Homesick for a place we’ve never been

In my Buddhist tradition, we are taught that each of us has an inborn longing to reconnect with our true nature. Like birds know how to return to their nest, the teachings say, we too know how to return to our Buddha nature, our innate knowledge of that place within us where we are fundamentally okay.

NARM speaks in similar language to describe the experience of complex trauma: “It’s like being homesick for a place we’ve never been.” Even though we have lived our entire lives in a state of dysregulation or depression, we still know on some level that there is something else, something better, easier, more satisfying.

Yet if we are stuck in a “Faux Window” of capacity, or just feel like we can’t even imagine what real ease, rest, or satisfaction would feel like, this can be quite tricky— like trying to imagine a color we’ve never seen. We don’t have a map to get there, or a conceptualization to work with.

This can be particularly irritating when we are told that something should be relaxing. Yoga teachers often make the (unintentional) mistake of inadvertently suggesting that students “should” be experiencing something. “This should feel good,” or, even, “Enjoy a few moments in child’s pose.” What happens if it doesn’t feel good, or we can’t enjoy it, or our system just won’t let us relax? I find that students tend to shame themselves, assuming that the problem lies within. Looking around the room during Savasana, if we’re not able to settle our systems, can be an isolating experience. Everyone else can rest, we think. Yoga isn’t for me. Or, worse: I’ll never be able to relax.

I believe that each of us does have a natural “homing” system— this longing to be at home, satisfied, comfortable, at ease with ourselves. While it may be harder for some of us to find our way there, it’s not impossible. And it’s really important that we try.

This is not a luxury. This is our natural state; our birthright. This isn’t something we get to do when we’ve finished our chores, or when we’ve achieved our social justice goals. If we cannot find this kind of satisfaction, in fact, we will never be able to truly help others; we’ll have burnt ourselves out long ago.

A naturally fluctuating system

So— how do we begin to find our way “home?”

Our nervous system responds to stress by providing us with necessary physiological resources (elevated heart rate, stress hormones, etc.) to drive us toward the top or even out of our “window” in order to handle the stressor. After it’s completed, we naturally cycle back downward into our “rest and digest” physiology inside the window.

It’s normal and healthy to be “activated.” A life lived only inside our window of capacity would be incredibly boring, and we would struggle to effect change in ourselves and in our lives. In fact, the ONLY way to increase our window of capacity is to push up against its edges.

You might recall from this post, in fact, that when we’re training the nervous system, we deliberately introduce a stressor and then allow ourselves to recover from it. The natural cycle is expansion and contraction— or, up, and then down— over and over again.

Still with me? Okay, hang on, because I’m about to tie a few things together.

Your complexes and you

If you happen to be someone who is “stuck” in an activated state, or who struggles to ever feel like you can “sit still;” who “doesn’t know how to have fun;” or who desperately wants to feel joy, pleasure, or satisfaction, but just can’t seem to make it happen, this cycle of expansion and contraction is especially relevant.

Our complexes, as Jung noted, are directly tied to our physiological experience. One of the hallmarks of a complex is that it has a specific “feeling tone.” When we’re in the grip of a complex, we may experience some intense physical responses in our bodies. Or, conversely, we may feel completely disconnected from them, because the complex is running the whole system!

Let’s go back to Laura, circa 2014, smiling at the trash in the yoga studio.

One of my most pervasive complexes is what we might call a “perfectionism and productivity” complex. It has always driven me to do more, to do it better, to work harder, to multitask, to only do something if it has a quantifiable benefit or purpose. This complex is also tied in to my sense of personal value— if I’m not being productive, then I am inherently unworthy. I know many of you can relate.

This complex was so successful, in part, because it worked insidiously with my nervous system physiology in a way that I have seen countless times since in myself and my clients.

The general formula is:

POSITIVE STATE MOVES YOU INTO WINDOW OF CAPACITY → NEGATIVE COMPLEX RESPONSE MOVES YOU BACK OUT

Here’s one variation:

• After a long day of work, you sit down to watch a show on Netflix. Your nervous system responds positively. “Ahh!” it says. “Now we’re going to get to relax and really feel good.”

• After a while (sometimes immediately!), the complex reacts: “What are you doing? You’ve got stuff to do! You can’t just sit here!”

In this case, the complex doesn’t let us stay in the restful part of the window of capacity, but drives us back out of it, up-regulating us back into activation.

Another common trick of the complex is the shame down-regulation method:

• You take some time for a “guilty pleasure” (note the language) activity, like playing a video game or reading a mystery novel. Time passes and you’re enjoying yourself so much I don’t notice.

• Finally, the complex breaks through. “LOOK WHAT TIME IT IS. You just wasted an hour on that and you’ve got nothing done. What’s wrong with you? This is why the house is a mess/our life is a wreck/we never meet our goals.”

In this variation, the complex won’t let the individual enjoy the pleasurable part of the window of capacity. It dampens the mood with shame, pushing the individual down into a hypoaroused state of depression.

It’s worth noting that all complexes have a positive and a negative aspect (or “pole,” as we sometimes say). Having a productivity or a perfectionism complex work for us is incredibly beneficial at times.

That’s why our complexes have the potential to bring more balance to our whole system, if we can work skillfully to integrate them. They’re always trying to nudge us one way or another. As we can see here, they actually do that by pushing us into different physiological states— often against our conscious will. But knowing that they can do this is incredibly powerful, as we’ll talk about in the next section.

Microdosing satisfaction

It wasn’t long after Trash-Smile-Gate that I began seeing a somatic psychotherapist. I’d sit on her couch for one hour each week and tell her how stressed I was, how jumpy, how irritable, and that I just couldn’t seem to relax.

It was difficult for me at the time to even settle my system in that very welcoming, safe office. As I got more comfortable, this became a different problem. “I feel good now,” I said to her, tearfully, one day. “But I’m just going to go back out there and get activated all over again!” (Do you recognize the complex, here, saying, “This isn’t working, you’re wasting your time, you shouldn’t even bother”?)

What she said to me then was pivotal:

“It still matters,” she said. “It still counts that you have this hour to feel good, to feel at home in your body.”

I’ve never forgotten this. I came to see that every time I practiced dropping into that sense of ease in my body, I was expanding my capacity to stay there. The more often I came home to myself, the more easily I’d be able to find my way there again. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was creating new neuronal pathways in my brain, learning how to be comfortable, safe-enough, satisfied.

For some of us, finding satisfaction is no problem. But for those of us who struggle with chronic activation (or hypoarousal), or who ping-pong between the two, never landing in that sweet spot in the middle— we can actively practice what I’m calling “microdosing satisfaction.”

In the video below, I’m setting up these dominos just so I can have the pleasure of knocking them down. It’s sped up, but you can see that I fail the first time, but I keep going. When I finally do get that moment of pleasure, I take a moment to feel it in my body.

What’s not pictured (because it’s invisible) is the thought that comes after: “What a waste of time,” or, “I can’t believe how long that took you.”

Remember our formula? For those of us who struggle with satisfaction, with finding our way “home,” we have to remember that:

POSITIVE STATE → NEGATIVE COMPLEX RESPONSE

This can be tricky to see at first because we’re so used to it it’s almost invisible. Once we start seeing this pattern, though, it can be quite comical in its regularity; our old broken record trying to keep us in line. We don’t need to try to stop it, or do anything with it (in fact, the more we try to shut it down, the louder it gets)— just acknowledge it. That’s enough to start to make change on its own.

Choose your own adventure

So what do you actually DO to “microdose satisfaction”? You don’t need to go buy dominos, unless you want to. Remember, we’re not trying to make big, sweeping change— we’re looking for tiny moments that feel good in our body and nervous system, and letting them accumulate over time.This might be a first sip of morning coffee, with an extra pause to notice how much you enjoy it. Or a really funny meme that you text to a friend. Or a moment, petting your cat, feeling its velvet fur under your fingertips.

Activities I’ve done with clients that feel satisfying include:

• Bouncing a ball in perfect rhythm for as long as we can

• Putting a puzzle together, savoring that moment of perfect fit!

• Creating a doodle drawing or coloring a mandala

• Learning a new skill or choreography

• Taking a walk and feeling how our arms swing with the opposite leg

It is not, as they say, rocket science. In fact, it’s so damn simple that the biggest challenge is our complex telling us, “that’s a waste of time.”

Did you notice that voice coming up as you read through the last few sentences? If so, see if you can just notice it, rather than identify automatically with it— and then you can make a choice.

Is it really a waste of time to experience satisfaction in your life? Or is this the way we finally start coming home to the lives we’re meant to live?

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.”

—C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation1, par 551

I have been feeling nauseous all week.

The release of further inhumane details from the Epstein files—exposing survivors’ names and brutalized experiences to public scrutiny—has underscored the staggering hypocrisy of a system that protects powerful men at the expense of children’s and women’s safety, rights, and dignity.

Add that to the ongoing violence from ICE and the release of the most overtly public racist trope from the White House, and the machinations being put in place to “protect” a “fair” election in November— it is, as they say, “a lot.”

The nausea that so many of us are feeling is a clear symptom: our bodies are under threat. Nausea is a physiological response to fear; it dampens metabolic activity as part of a “freeze” response. And there’s a lot to be afraid of right now. The people in power are dangerous, and our collective refusal to simply comply with their demands is pushing them to greater and more egregious displays of power and violence.

Fear itself is a healthy response to a threatening situation. It’s what we do with that fear that matters.

“The good girl” complex

Among everything else happening this week, I hadn’t paid much attention to the release of the Melania documentary. So when I saw that the brilliant had written a post about it a few days ago, I was intrigued by her title, and had to know more.

Patton’s thoughtful and incisive analysis resonated so much that I think it’s worth sharing a long excerpt:

(These white women) were watching a woman who appears to have learned how to remain materially secure and socially protected while standing next to volatile white male power. They were watching a version of survival that looks controlled instead of chaotic, polished instead of desperate, elevated instead of trapped.

But if you go one layer deeper, they were also watching a woman who seemed to answer questions many of them have been taught not to ask out loud. How do you stay safe next to a man whose anger fills a room? How do you maintain status when the person tied to your stability is also capable of cruelty? How do you keep your life intact when the system that protects you is the same cruel system hurting other people? How do you convince yourself that proximity to power is the same thing as having power?

Because for many white women, the documentary was not just about Melania. It was about witnessing a woman who appears to have mastered the art of emotional containment inside male dominance. It was about watching what it looks like to stand next to a man who is feared, hated, or controversial and still move through the world with protection, wealth, and social insulation intact.

And at a moment in American history where many white women are living alongside white men who are angrier, more radicalized, more openly hostile to demographic change, more resentful of women’s autonomy, more vulnerable to extremist pipelines, and more comfortable expressing racist or misogynistic ideas out loud, that image carries enormous psychological weight. Because it raises a quiet, dangerous question: If this is what white male power looks like now, what does survival next to it require?

I grew up in a small, white, conservative town. I live in a slightly-larger-but-still-small, white, conservative town. I am intimately familiar with these white men2 who are “angrier, more radicalized, more openly hostile,” etc. During a peaceful protest in our town last year, a (conservative) white teenage male punched an elderly (liberal) white woman in the stomach. The white male rage in the air is as palpable as the exhaust fuming from their pickup trucks.

When these men, who are also my neighbors, smile and wave at me on the street, I am aware that as a white woman, I have the privilege of “passing” as one of “them.” Unless I tell them I am bisexual, that we have a trans daughter, that I voted for Kamala, that I do not support ICE, etc., I can be “safe.”

Of course the “good girl” in me very much wants to appease, to be safe, to fly under the radar. Despite being raised in a feminist household, I am a product of patriarchal, white supremacist culture. I can (and do) work every day of my life to address these internalized issues and to reassert my own sense of justice, power, and integrity, but I am no longer debilitated by shame around this complex. The shame itself would keep us locked into the hierarchy— as Patton says, these are “questions many of (us) have been taught not to ask out loud.” Speaking up, no matter how queasy we feel, is how we break the spell.

We also have to remember that in extreme circumstances, the “good girl complex” means literal survival. In violent systems, fawning—appeasing men in power—may be the only strategy that allows survival until escape becomes possible. For individuals who are survivors of sexual violence, or intimate partner violence, or an abusive childhood, this complex is likely to be more and more activated as patriarchal powers escalate: we know what there is to fear.

But there’s a hefty price to be paid in simply, as Patton says, convincing “yourself that proximity to power is the same thing as having power.”

Not even an anti-hero

“[It] is quite frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious.”

— CG Jung, The Undiscovered Self, para 5613

What is it that each of us is called to do, in the face of oppression and real embodied danger? My understanding is that each of us must consult our own psyche to know what is right for us— and if we fail to face our own fear, as Jung says in the epigraph above, “the meaning of life is somehow violated.”

Here is the dream of a factory owner living under the Nazi regime:

“Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised.”

This dream, collected by Charlotte Beradt in her book The Third Reich of Dreams4, was a recurring one for the sixty-year old dreamer. Beradt says of this man,

“(H)e came to an accurate conclusion: that his attempt in front everyone to toe the Nazi line, his public humiliation, ended up being nothing but a rite of passage into a new world of totalitarian power— a political maneuver, a cold and cynical human experiment in applying state power to break the individual’s will. The fact that the factory owner crumbled without resistance, but also without his downfall having any purpose or meaning, makes his dream a perfect parable for the creation of the submissive totalitarian subject.'“

Beradt concludes, “He has not even become unheroic, much less an anti-hero— he has become a non-person.”

What kind of safety has this man bought himself? In denying his own sense of integrity; in aligning himself with the power of the oppressor; the factory owner personifies Jung’s “violation” of life’s meaning. In one variation of the dream, in fact, during the half-hour struggle to raise his arm, his spine actually breaks. Dreams don’t mince words.

In contrast, here is a dream from the US, which came shortly after the 2025 presidential inauguration:

“I am being chased by a group of angry men. I am able to duck into a space and get away from them, and in the dream I imagine that I have my steel mace (the weapon that we use for training). I started going through the exercises with the mace in my dream, and even though I wasn’t even holding the mace in the dream, but only pretending to, I felt stronger and more in control.”

The dreamer recognized that she was able not only to escape the “angry men,” but that she had internal resources to empower her. The dream image of wielding a mace was especially potent for her, as she related it to feeling stronger and more powerful. It let her feel less afraid of the patriarchal power she related to the incoming administration.

When we fail to connect to our own sense of power; when we are passive in the face of oppression; when we ignore our own soul’s urging to do what we know is right, we run the risk of “accidentally” aligning ourselves with evil. Still, at other moments, we may need to strategically align with the oppressor (cloaked in the Trickster archetype) to live to fight another day. I cannot judge anyone else’s actions. I don’t need to— our dreams will know the truth.

I can only listen to my own dreams, and their urgings. They tell me to move through my nausea, to brave my own fear, and to “take the risk,” as Jung says, in sharing my thoughts and feelings with you.

In a recent post, “This is Your Nervous System on Fascism,” we reviewed the Window of Capacity model of the nervous system, and introduced the basic concept of nervous system training as a means to help us hold steady in the face of increasing external stressors.

While this model can be helpful to understand how and why we might respond to stress, there is a danger in offering oversimplified explanations or “solutions” that will only leave people feeling worse when they don’t feel like they “fit” or “work.”

Humans, like all animals, present in endless variations and possibilities. There are, among us, exceptional individuals that are rare, and extraordinary. They are not easily classified; their systems are specialized, adapted to survive in environments that would otherwise have killed, maimed, or used them for their own nefarious purposes.

These humans are the unicorns of the nervous system world. Some hide in plain sight, their magical properties disguised for daily living. Others live in the fringes of the forest, choosing how and when they will interact with others, knowing the potential danger that lurks in their fellow beasts.

These unique humans do not fall tidily into the model I offered a few weeks ago. This week, I invite you to consider this topic both from a slightly different model, and through the imagery of The Unicorn Tapestries, a vivid series of 16th-century tapestries that depict the hunt and capture of this mythical creature. I hope that these symbols will work on us at a deeper level to counteract an oversimplified clinical understanding that is prevalent in today’s discussion of nervous system and mental health physiology.

Hyperfunctional nervous systems

“The nature of survival physiology is that it’s meant to function somewhat like a runaway train. Once it’s initiated, we are almost powerless to stop it because we can’t afford to deliberate at length about whether there may be a more rational explanation for what’s going on, or whether the threat may not be as severe as first thought. We are instead driven by the survival imperative to simply respond immediately. When our own lives are at stake, we can’t afford to take chances.”

-Kain, K. L., & Terrell, S. J., Nurturing Resilience

Imagine a creature that is born, pristine and perfect, into a dangerous time and place. Raised by wolves— or left to raise herself— or, with two loving parents who lived under the constant threat of discovery, forced to move from place to place— he never knows the safety of a stable home. How does this unicorn survive?

• She learns to be ever-vigilant, ready to flee, or fight, at the first sign of peril.

• He develops an extra-sensory capacity to feel what others are feeling— so that he can sense danger before it strikes.

• She becomes a shape-shifter, disguising herself to any environment, so that she can “pass” as needed in a hostile climate.

• He learns to prioritize survival above all other needs.

The cost for these adaptations is quite high. Meaningful connection, finding one’s life purpose, even getting a good night’s sleep are all impossible for the hunted unicorn. Still, it endures. It has honed its survival skills to the sharpest edge.

The unicorn, you might say, has a hyperfunctional nervous system.

What makes perfect sense from a survival point of view becomes something else entirely when the unicorn is captured and scrutinized under clinical care. Survival strategies are seen as problematic symptoms. The beautiful, elegant design of its carefully shaped nervous system is dissected into disorders, abnormal, dysregulation. What should be prized, respected, held with reverence, is degraded, shamed, and pathologized.

This, as much as anything else the unicorn has endured, can prove lethal; a different understanding is needed.

The “faux window” of capacity

For some of us, discharging stress (that is, moving back into our window of capacity), is as simple as going for a walk. We easily find our way back to an “okay-enough” state.

For wild unicorns, that window of capacity is so small, so elusive, that we may never even have found it. As we start to approach that window, we jolt ourselves back into vigilance— not safe!— never able to rest.

These folks don’t respond to simple interventions because their nervous systems aren’t simple. This can be deeply frustrating, as their sense that something is wrong is reinforced by professionals who misunderstand them, offer “fixes” that don’t work, and throw up their hands in despair, further traumatizing the individual.

Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, in their book Nurturing Resilience,1 introduce an adjusted model that I have found quite useful to understand what might be happening for these folks: the “faux window” of capacity.

Consider our modern-day unicorn. In the model below, we see that for these individuals, the “true” window of capacity is quite narrow. These individuals have adapted to a state of constant overstimulation, or shutdown, or they oscillate between the two, never safe enough to experience a state of ease and rest that would come from the organic process of nervous system regulation.

These hyperfunctional individuals are often hiding in plain sight. On the hyperarousal side, they’ve learned how to self-soothe or dampen the effects through behaviors (eating disorders; addiction, etc.) that mimic regulation— but don’t actually bring them into their window of capacity.

For those in the hypoarousal “faux window,” depressed, dissociated or shut-down states are mitigated by behaviors that stimulate or mimic arousal, so that they can function in their daily lives.

In a culture that values workaholism, perfectionism, and even disordered eating, these traits are often celebrated— in the same way that parents appreciate a “good baby” who doesn’t cry, not recognizing that it’s learned to shut off its protests. Our unicorns are perfectly disguised.

It works, until it doesn’t

“In the Faux Window, we create a sense of stability and regulation of arousal by narrowing our range of responses, but that narrowing means we can’t access the resilience that is affiliated with having flexibility and the full range in our response systems— what we would have with a healthy Window.”

-Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, Nurturing Resilience

Survival biology has a high energetic cost. In mimicking regulation, rather than actually achieving it, the whole system works harder than one who is able to periodically rest. It is exhausting for the body and a drain on the spirit. There is no extra life force available for creativity or spiritual connection.

When the system’s equilibrium fails, the unicorn is driven out of the faux window, sometimes into a catastrophic response. These individuals are prone to chronic illness2, and a host of “mystery symptoms” which can lead them from doctor to doctor, looking for help. Or their strategies become more problematic than supportive, and they’re forced to seek help for what becomes (often multiple) mental health diagnoses. And there are some unicorns who are discovered (outed? rescued? captured?) early in their lives, shuffled in and out of institutions, medicated, therapized, and chronically misunderstood.

Co-regulation is key

Underlying all of these symptoms, below this survival strategy— is a nervous system that never had an opportunity to develop. More fundamental still is the human soul that has been deprived of real connection and understanding. It is only through that human connection that these nervous systems can shift their patterns to finally, really, rest.

For folks who are living in the “faux” window— our unicorns— the standard interventions just don’t work. In fact, they can often further entrench the nervous system by reinforcing existing patterns. Yes, teaching them to use a particular breathing technique to “regulate” may offer some much-needed relief— At the same time, if we are only offering external tools to manage symptoms or to override their natural response, we are reinforcing patterns of faux regulation. True regulation— the only place in which their systems can recharge— remains out of reach. It’s a dead giveaway that this is happening when the person comes to rely so heavily on an intervention that they can’t function without it. This is yet another survival strategy.

In working with a more complex system like this one, patience is key— for both parties. Rather than rushing to apply interventions, simply practicing presence with the individual is what will begin to create change. For helping professionals, it’s important that we address our own issues with helplessness here, as well as our own nervous system patterns and habits. I have learned that the harder I work, feeling like I need to do something, the more I get in the way of the process.

That’s because what is missing for our unicorns— what has, perhaps, always been missing— is true coregulation with a consistent, stable, grounded, empathetic other, in a safe-enough environment.

Coregulation:

“encompasses the mutual adaptation between partners in response to one another’s biology and behavior. Coregulation operates at both biological (hormonal and nervous system) and behavioral (affective and cognitive) levels and plays a crucial role in the development of self-regulation”.3

Nervous system development is completely dependent on coregulation. We learn to regulate ourselves by first coregulating with a caregiver. This forms the pathways and patterns that will lead to a healthy and responsive nervous system. This is true in nervous system growth, as infants, but it is equally true for nervous system repair.

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Speaking of this phenomenon, developmental researcher Allan Schore says,

“The skill of being with patients over long periods of time is key here. The key to making changes in the patient is not what you say to the patient or do to the patient. It’s how to be with the patient. Especially while that person’s being is in a dysregulated state.”4

Coaches, personal trainers, and other movement professionals are perfectly positioned for this work. We have the opportunity to coregulate while playing or practicing simple movement skills; exactly the way that our nervous system is meant to develop in early life.

Coregulation here isn’t a complicated skillset; most of us do it quite naturally. At its simplest, it’s the experience of being with the other in a non-judgmental way, allowing them to have their own experience within a safe-enough environment. This means that any good trauma-informed coach, somatic practitioner, or movement professional can facilitate change in the other’s nervous system as long as both parties can be patient enough to allow the process to work (of course, as a NARM-informed practitioner, I’m biased, but I believe that their model is almost miraculous in how well it works here).

A window by any other name…

In the image below, we see our unicorn at peace, a calm expression on his face. He is recovering from his wounds. While he is enclosed in a small fence, this is one he could easily jump over. The fence in our metaphor symbolizes the safe boundary that now exists between him and the world, and which lets him truly settle into rest.

I have a reproduction of this tapestry in my home. It’s a reminder of both the exquisite, magical beauty of our feral nature, and the need for safe harbor.

The Unicorn Tapestries depict the hunt and capture of the unicorn, which may symbolize the pursuit of love, or the Christian myth— or both, of course. I’ve taken some liberties with the symbolism for this post, but the same archetypal truth applies. While the hunters stamp through the woods with their hounds and horns, cornering the beast, driving it into a frenzied defense— it is only, finally, through the touch of a “maiden”— that is, through Eros, relationality, pure empathetic connection— that the unicorn is “tamed,” though he still retains his beauty and magical form.

xo,

Laura

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“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.”

—Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here (1967)

In last week’s post, “This is Your Nervous System on Fascism,” we reviewed the Window of Capacity model, and introduced the basic concept of nervous system training as a means to help us hold steady in the face of increasing external stressors (this week alone has been full of them, from Davos to Minneapolis).

I have more to say about that model— and how it isn’t always a perfect fit for everyone. In fact, I had a whole post written— but as I sat down to write this morning, I found that there was something else “that wanted to come into the world through me,” as my favorite Jungian analyst, James Hollis says.

I want to talk about power.

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The language of “regulation”

So much of what we learn about the nervous system— especially online, where there is little room for nuanced or balanced conversation— is framed in language that is overly clinical and potentially pathologizing.

Two terms that are frequently used are “tolerance” (as in “Window of Tolerance”), and “regulation,” as in, “We need to do a better job of regulating our nervous systems.” What are we learning to tolerate? What are we having to regulate ourselves for, and for whom? This language can reinforce the very oppressive systems that were causing much of our distress, and the focus on personal responsibility for “managing our stress” keeps us from questioning the cause.

Additionally, there is a sort of binary “right and wrong” implication that creeps into the conversation. Fight or flight is treated preferentially, as a “healthy” nervous system response, while “freeze” and “fawn1” are tinged with shame.

Imagine RFK talking about the nervous system response. "Oh, you couldn’t fight the bear? You couldn’t run away from the bear? I guess the best you could do is play dead. Maybe if you spent more time in the gym.2”

There are no bad survival strategies; there is only survival. Nor, in my mind, is there any such thing as “maladaptation”— how can we judge, or pathologize, any adaptation that keeps us alive in a system that would otherwise kill us? Even the common term “dysregulation”— used within a system that is inherently dysregulating— can, at times, imply a judgment3.

For me, having a conversation about— or even doing nervous system training— isn’t enough. We have to also consider how our individual systems fit into the larger systems of our lives, and how we want to live in the world.

One way to think about this is through the “locus of control” continuum.

External, internal, balanced: locus of control

In the graph below, you can see that on the far right, we have individuals who have strongly internalized the idea that they are personally responsible for their life circumstances (and especially, for this conversation, their mental and physical wellbeing). These individuals are living in a state of inflation; they disregard external circumstances, and expend their energy inwardly, regulating, blaming and managing themselves. Alternately, these individuals may be inflated in a different sense— using and abusing their power in narcissistic ways— but again, that’s another post.

This internalized position is reinforced by our culture’s neoliberal complexes and the emphasis on personal responsibility. For a stark look at how this is being emphasized in 2026, you can check out realfood.gov (I refuse to link to it, so you’ll have to type it in yourself) which tells us that “America is sick” because of our poor food choices. Never mind any of the other biological, social, environmental, or psychological causes of illness— just shop better.

Or, from this internalized, inflated position, we find ourselves caught in the endless cycle of “biohacking” or “self-optimization;” another way to keep us stuck, as Tull says:

“Participating on the treadmill of hierarchy and constant self-improvement to either maintain one place or move higher up the scale, is it self a full-time job that takes us further, and further away from authentic power.”

-Deborah Eden Tull, Luminous Darkness 4

On the other side of the continuum, we have individuals who feel that they can’t control anything in their lives, because they have an overly externalized locus of control. They probably don’t go around saying “I’m a helpless victim,” but you may recognize them from their general apathy and nihilism. Why vote? Why do anything? Nothing matters. We can think of this as a state of deflation, which is what it sounds like. It’s hard to get around in the world if your tires are half-empty. May as well let the car rot in the driveway.

Few of us are totally stuck on one end of this continuum. Most of us bounce back and forth between opposite ends of the continuum, inflation and deflation. In turns, we both feel that it is up to us to try to do something and that nothing we do will make a difference.

Layering this over our “Window of Capacity” model5, you can imagine someone who’s ping-ponging back and forth between bouts of frantic energy (going to the gym! working extra hours! write my Senator! “Be the Change!”) and total collapse (burnout, exhaustion, feeling of failure).

Can you see how convenient this is for a system that wants to keep us from ever having the power to make REAL change? In terms of nervous system work— well, I bet those powers-that-be would be absolutely thrilled to know that we’re learning how to “tolerate” more.

So how do we get to that balanced locus of control, where we can both recognize an inherently unjust system and our own capacity for personal and global change?

This is where Jung’s work comes in.

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Our inner and outer dictators

“In childhood we learn, overlearn, our powerlessness; we internalize authority figures and societal norms and later, as adult worker ants, serve them slavishly. To run counter to them causes us inauthentic guilt and anxiety.”

-James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul

These internalized authority figures drain our life force; they keep us stuck, like “worker ants” in the cycle of inflation and deflation I’ve described above. And while we may not be consciously aware of them, we can see, hear, and experience them directly through our dreams.

I have tracked the effects of our increasingly totalitarian government not only in my nervous system, but in my dreams (and the dreams of my clients). As things escalated in the “real world,” my dreams reflected not only my very-real fears about what was happening in my country (concentration camps, casual s*xual assault, murder), but also my internalized sense of power— or powerlessness.

Working with these dreams and integrating what I was learning from them into my waking life, things started to change for me. In my dreams, Trickster figures emerged, helping my dream-ego (that is, the “me” in my dream) escape from a mob of angry men. I learned, in my dreams, that I could lie, rather than submit to the authoritarian figures that threatened me. In other dreams, my dream-ego grew stronger. In recurring dreams where I’d had previously to submit to thankless, repetitive tasks, I found myself saying, “I don’t have to do that,” and walking away. And figures that had always been dictatorial— a mean old boss, for example— apologized to me. In waking life, I felt myself sliding to the middle of that continuum graph above. Yes, things really were as bad as I’d feared they’d be— but I didn’t feel completely powerless.

Jung’s transcendent function

The two opposite ends of the “locus of control” continuum represent two opposite ways of thinking about ourselves. When we are in an inflated state, we think of ourselves as powerful, omnipotent, totally able to make change.

As an example, I’m thinking of that “75 Hard Mental Toughness” challenge people were doing a few years ago. For 75 days, these die-hards committed to following a particular diet; doing two workouts a day; drinking a gallon of water, and reading 10 pages of non-fiction a day. As long as this was working, these folks were SO INFLATED. They didn’t even let the thought of failure enter in. Some of these people, later, became so completely deflated that they were utterly disenchanted with any kind of exercise or program. “Never again,” they swore. Each aspect of this individual’s personality— “Die-hard” and “Never again” would barely recognize the other— this is how well we silo off our opposite parts.

I think of inflation and deflation— or any opposite personality positions— like two roommates that share the same apartment, but work opposite shifts. They never see each other, and they don’t even want to know about the other one. “This is my place,” they think. But each of them, through their extreme approaches, is creating a huge mess in their shared living space that will have to be dealt with eventually.

Here’s where Jung’s “transcendent function” comes into play:

“The shuttling to and from of arguments and affects represents the transcendent function of opposites. The confrontation of the two positions generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living third thing... a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. The transcendent function manifests itself as a quality of conjoined opposites.”

—C Jung, “The transcendent function”6,

In other words, we need to get these two roommates- Inflation and Deflation— into the same room and have a talk, so that a new position, a new attitude, a more-balanced approach can be achieved.

A case study in power and “service”

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive….We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.”

—Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

Let’s consider this simple dream7:

I am at a restaurant I like a lot. Waiting for the food, I see the person next to me eating a beautiful, elaborate little dish. A waitress asks me to bring some plates to other diners, and I am happy to help. It feels fun. I take two plates to two tables and a check to another. The person who was next to me asks for another appetizer because this one was so hard to eat. I am surprised at her nerve as it seems like that’s asking for too much, but then realize it’s probably fine and she deserves to get another one. Then I realize it is time to leave and I haven’t gotten to eat anything.

This dreamer recognized, through this dream, how she is “always expected to serve”— and that she never gets to eat herself. This hit her pretty hard; she recognized, felt in her body, how physically tiring, how sad, how achingly familiar that feeling of over-responsibility is.

What about the woman who’s “asking for too much” but “deserves to get another” dish? This, too, hit home. The dreamer said, “Oh…it’s not wrong to ask for what you need.” She took a deep breath, here, as this settled in. The roommates are finally talking.

This dream was nudging the dreamer toward a greater sense of balanced agency. The waitress, representing outside forces (deflated, overly-externalized locus of control)— asks her to “serve;” but it also highlights her overly-internalized locus of control— “I am happy to help.” It’s the other patron whose “nerve” shows the dreamer the way toward a real, balanced agency.

Rebalancing power, starting with ourselves

Nervous system work is an important start, especially in a culture that is wreaking havoc on each of our individual systems. If we stop there, however, we’re stopping short of reclaiming our personal and collective potential— whatever that may be.

Our nervous system is interdependent with our psychic system: they are not separate. As we stabilize and widen our window of capacity, more life force becomes available in the form of peace of mind and ease of body. And when we are not caught in an infinite loop of activation/collapse, or inflation/deflation, we have greater freedom and vitality to engage with our life’s work.

“Inasmuch as collectivities are mere accumulations of individuals, their problems are accumulations of individual problems. One set of people identifies itself with the superior man and cannot descend, and the other set identifies itself with the inferior man and wants to get to the top.

Such problems are never solved by legislation or by tricks. They are solved only by a general change of attitude. And the change does not begin with propaganda and mass meetings, or with violence. It begins with a change in individuals. It will continue as a transformation of their personal likes and dislikes, of their outlook on life and of their values, and only the accumulation of these individual changes will produce a collective solution.”

—CG Jung, Psychology and Religion8, CW 11

Thanks for reading, y’all— wishing you both some ease and power for the week ahead.

XO,

Laura

PS. If you’re into this kind of thing, my colleague (and go-to breathing expert) and I are offering our Better Breathing for Trauma 4 week course again in April. See what you think and sign up here.

Like a delicate, hothouse orchid, or a high-strung chihuahua, my nervous system requires tender care, thoughtful nourishment, early bedtimes and mindful exposure to stimulation.

I didn’t always know this about myself, actually. When I was younger, I didn’t understand why I became cranky or irritable with others after too much stimulation; why I would have to go to bed just to escape from a social event in my own living room; why I would have to compulsively eat, or down a drink, or chain-smoke cigarettes. I didn’t realize how much distress I was trying to manage. I just thought something was wrong with me.

Not all nervous systems are created equal

Judging by the fireworks that were still going at 1 am this New Year’s Eve, not everyone has a nervous system like mine. While I laid in bed feeling as though each BOOM detonated directly in my solar plexus, I have to assume they were enjoying the excitement and stimulation that can only be found by blowing shit up at midnight.

What makes one person love that adrenaline rush while another person dreads it? Some of it might be a function of our extraversion or introversion. Introverts, Andrew Samuels says, are “energized by the internal world1,” while extroverts get their kicks from their external life. A character in Netflix’s The Four Seasons puts it succinctly: extroverts get happy “from the outside in.”

So while an extrovert may delight in a roller coaster or a loud concert but feel restless during an hour of journaling, an introvert may find outer stimulation exhausting and contemplative time deeply restorative.

Of course, people who have experienced PTSD—sometimes called “shock trauma,” involving one or more discrete traumatic events—or CPTSD, which involves chronic and prolonged stress, often have a very different relationship with their nervous systems. One hallmark of PTSD, according to the DSM-5, is hypervigilance: a persistent need to stay alert, paired with an exaggerated startle response— making fireworks a true nightmare.

And in cases of developmental trauma—repeated patterns of misattunement, instability, or environmental failure during early life—the nervous system can become something else entirely. More on that in our next post.

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The Window of Capacity model

Many of you may already be familiar with this model, but for those who aren’t, it’s a helpful way to understand nervous system regulation. It’s based on Dan Siegel’s “Window of Tolerance.” I prefer the term Window of Capacity, a formulation I learned through ’s work. “Capacity” emphasizes strength and agency, whereas “tolerance” can imply passive endurance within an oppressive system.

Here’s a silly example to illustrate. Imagine you’re at home watching your favorite show, relaxed and at ease—well within your window. Suddenly, a bear appears in the doorway. (I warned you— it’s silly.)

Your nervous system immediately mobilizes: heart rate increases, stress hormones flood your body, and you enter a hyperaroused state—ready to fight or flee. Alternatively, if escape or defense feels impossible, you might freeze. You’re immobilized, playing dead, in a hypoaroused state.

Suddenly, the bear pauses and removes its head. It’s not a bear at all—it’s your friend in a costume playing a terrible joke. You laugh (or throw something at them), the stress resolves, and you return to your window of capacity.

Shaking it off

If you’ve ever seen a dog “shaking it off” after a stressful event— like chasing a squirrel, or barking at the mail carrier— you’ve seen the basic nervous system response in action.

Our nervous systems evolved to handle simple stressors this way.:

1. We’re exposed to a stressor (a bear);

2. Our systems mobilize (body temperature goes up, heart rate increases, stress hormones flood our system);

3. We deal with the stressor by escaping or conquering it, or “playing dead;”

4. The stress is resolved, we “shake it off,” the stress hormones dissipate, and

5. We’re back at homeostasis, ready for the next stressor.

Enjoy a pretty graph about this below:

But of course, it’s not always this simple.

Your nervous system in 2026

Today, our stressors aren’t bears. They’re financial strain, conflict with a child, a cancer diagnosis, or living with a marginalized identity in a hostile culture.

These stressors don’t resolve neatly. They can’t simply be shaken off.

As a result, many of us live in chronic hypervigilance—an ongoing sense of threat even when we’re objectively safe. Others live in exhaustion and shutdown, unable to summon the energy to do the very things that might help. Unrelenting stress prevents us from returning to our window of capacity. We never fully rest or replenish before the next demand arrives.

You may already see the problem with a simplistic reading of this model. In a culture shaped by healthism, it can imply that stress is something we should be able to control—and that failing to regulate ourselves is a personal failure. Like those old “this is your brain on drugs” commercials, an oversimplified model suggests we just need to keep our egg out of the frying pan.

But in 2026, we are all in the frying pan.

The threats of global fascism and environmental collapse affect all of us.

Some of us have been sizzling on the heat for decades already. The illusion that we can escape the frying pan is one that has been reserved for those with greater privilege; but that dream is now fading for all but the hyper elite. Unless you are living in complete isolation in a cave in Tibet,2 your nervous system is feeling the strain of global events. It’s what it means to be human in our times.

Hang on, though, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Balancing the allostatic load

“Allostatic load,” a term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar, refers to the cumulative physiological wear and tear our bodies endure. It includes not only “negative” stress—political, financial, environmental—but also “positive” stress: travel, socializing, exercise, even a glass of wine.

When I work with someone whose nervous system is stuck outside their window of capacity, one of the first things we explore is their allostatic load. What is stressing the system? Which stressors can be reduced—late nights, excessive screen time, overtraining, that third or fourth drink?

The nuance is important here. Sometimes those hard workouts, or that workaholism, is what’s holding someone together. Sometimes screen time is their only social connection. The work is distinguishing what is genuinely resourcing from what is straining the system.

This insight has to arise from within. In my experience, people often know what their nervous systems need—we just have to slow down enough to listen.

The moral neutrality of stress

Stress, believe it or not, is neither good nor bad.

Hans Selye, who pioneered stress research in the 1930s, came to regret the negative connotation that the word “stress” has. Although it never became popular, he coined the term “eustress” to refer to the type of stress that we need to grow and change.

In fact, as researcher Kelly McGonigal shares below, even negative stress does not have to be detrimental to our health— unless we believe that it is.

If you get nothing else out of this article, I hope that you take this away: how we think about stress has a powerful effect on how it affects us.

Training our nervous systems

Stress is a necessary ingredient for growth.

Bones strengthen when we load them appropriately—this is Wolff’s Law. Muscles adapt through the SAID principle: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. Too little stress leads to atrophy; too much leads to injury. Growth happens in that just-right zone.

Our nervous systems work the same way.

In the post above( you don’t need to watch it, unless you want to hear more about this), I described two characters: “Sweaty Betty,” who thrives on constant pushing and may be stuck in hyperarousal, and “Steady Freddy,” who avoids activation and may be stuck in hypoarousal. It’s a crude oversimplification, but it helps illustrate how different systems need different inputs.

For Sweaty Betty, the work may involve learning to tolerate slower states—long walks, gentle strength training, creative practices—learning to find safety in rest. For Steady Freddy, the work may involve carefully reintroducing activation—movement, play, relational engagement—so that arousal no longer feels inherently dangerous.

Both need to learn rhythm: when to push, when to rest, and how to balance movement with other life stressors. This is how we expand our window of capacity.

Yes, I made another chart.

Freeing ourselves so we can free others

This is a simple-enough process, but because humans are so darn complicated, it isn’t always easy. And the outside-of-our-stressors— life be lifing, as they say— can mean that it’s really hard to figure out how hard, or when, we should push ourselves (I talk more about this here, and how I use HRV- heart rate variability- as a helpful metric).

Still, there’s an elegant, instinctual wisdom to this system. Learning to listen and respond to our bodies in this way means that we have not only increased capacity, but increased vitality— life force!— to support the work we are meant to do in the world.

When we are faced with burning, life-or-death issues like the collapse of democracy or genocide, or state-sanctioned murder, it may seem like the very last thing we should be focusing on is our physical and mental health. Believe me, I get it. Literally, people are dying, and I’m suggesting you take a walk.

Yet so many of us are teetering on the verge of burnout and exhaustion. We’re caught up in complexes of overwork, productivity and saviorism that keep us from replenishing our own resources. We need to free ourselves, so that we can help free others.

Nervous system training isn’t a luxury— it’s the only way to make our work sustainable. The alternatives— burnout, exhaustion, chronic numbness— do little to further our cause. If we are called to this work, as I think we all are, now— for democracy, for freedom, for our planet— this type of training is not a luxury but a necessity.

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“The decisive question in life is: are we related to the infinite or not? That is the real criterion. Then we can put personal sensitivities to one side. We still have them, these sensitivities, but they no longer define us.“

— CG Jung, interview with Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Life and Work

“The body that can engage in building what we truly need, that can sustain action over time, is something different from the distractible, unmoored body manipulated by social media. It is a rhythmic body, undulating, present, feeling, capable of curiosity, awe, rage, and love. It is a body that can generate a safety for ourselves and others, that along with the despair, can tap into the possibility that if we commit and are willing to change, and allow others the same grace, we might just win.”

-Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal1

I’m writing this on a Sunday morning after my daily walk around the neighborhood. As I started out, I’d just read Heather Cox Richardson’s daily post, in which she describes how the Trump administration released video from an ICE agent showing the murder of protestor Renee Good, thinking it would exonerate the agent:

“In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: ‘That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,’ only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out ‘F*cking bitch’ after he killed her.”

-Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, January 10, 2026

I was turning this over and over in my mind as I walked, feeling the painful reality of our broken country in my body, when I ran into a neighbor who (I happen to know) voted for the current regime and its ideology. We stopped and talked about our dogs; she empathized with Louis’ arthritis, and I could feel her friendliness, her kindness, her innate good qualities. As I stood talking to her, I felt both genuine warmth toward her, and the pain, confusion and dissonance of knowing how likely it was that she supports ICE and its agents.

What are we embodying?

One of the principles of somatics— the ancient technology of working with our body as a vehicle for transformation— is that at any given moment, we are embodying something.

We can embody love, compassion, anger, confusion, fear, or any combination of these mental/emotional states. When we’re disconnected from our bodies— as many of us are— we’re still embodying disconnection from ourselves.

Whatever we’re embodying is transmitted from our bodies to those around us, intentionally or not. This is how we can feel when someone’s words don’t match their body language; when there’s dissonance, incongruence, or something just feels “off.”

What are you embodying right now? You don’t need to be a somatic expert to answer this question. We can begin this inquiry by asking ourselves, what am I thinking, or feeling? What’s my mood like? Am I irritable? Do I have a headache? Whatever we are thinking or feeling is being lived out through our tissues, and transmitted to the world around us.

Conversely, sometimes it is our bodies that give us information about our mental or emotional state. Take a moment more to notice how you’re holding your body right now; are you curled inward, or ready to spring into action? Check in with your breath: is it shallow, or more global? Let go of any judgment or anxiety around this, if you can, and just notice what is there without trying to change it. There is no mental, emotional, or somatic state that is inherently bad; they all serve a purpose.

When we are living in a difficult season— perhaps, in a democratic crisis, the most difficult season of our lives— it is completely natural that we embody the tension, fear, grief, and anger that we are all carrying. If we can normalize that, we’ve gone a good way toward understanding ourselves better. We can also make space to intentionally embody something else in addition to this pain: we can embody our sense of the infinite, whatever that is for each of us.

Finding the infinite

One of the reasons I resonate with Jung’s work is that it is centered around the idea that each of us must find what is personally meaningful to us.

“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.”

– Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 509

“Religion,” according to Jung, was not necessarily tied to any formal religion or dogma, but rather the individual’s personal understanding of, or encounter with what he termed “the infinite,” or “the numinous”— our personal understanding of something larger than us, that moves us, that keeps us going when it feels like life is to heavy to bear. Some individuals find this in church; others, in a forest; others, after a life-shattering loss. Jung felt so strongly about the critical importance of this "factor that he said,

“The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses, but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and in as much as you attain to numinous experiences, you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.2”

-Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, emphasis mine

That genuine spirituality has a healing role in our lives is borne out by modern research.3. But it cannot be something that is externally imposed, as Lionel Corbett reminds us:

“To be useful, one’s spirituality has to be authentic, which means it has to arise organically from the depth of one’s being. It cannot be imposed by a tradition when the teachings of the tradition to not match the personality of the individual.”

-Lionel Corbett, The Sacred Cauldron4

While I was raised a Lutheran Christian, nothing about it ever really connected for me. It wasn’t until I encountered Tibetan Buddhism that I had my first felt sense— or, another way of saying it, my first embodied knowing— of a numinous experience. There’s a saying in Tibetan Buddhism, you can be drawn to it “like iron filings to a magnet.” That’s how I felt when I discovered these teachings— it was a magnetic attraction that was beyond rational understanding; I felt this as an ineffable truth in my body.

So, I cannot tell you how to find the infinite, your own experience of the divine, if you do not already know. Nobody can (although they certainly will try). But I’m betting that you already have a sense of this in your own life. If you’re not sure, you can ask yourself, where do I feel most authentic, most myself? What do I feel is most purposeful, or meaningful, for me? If all we have is a sense of longing, can we connect to that?

Intention over disconnection

We live in a time of deep disconnection: disconnection from our bodies, from “the infinite,” from each other.

When we make a choice to consciously embody our personal sense of the infinite, we can infuse meaning and purpose into our lives— and bring the infinite to life in the world.

Our bodies are the means by which we communicate, not only verbally, but somatically, with each other. This morning, on my walk, I was mindful that I was embodying not only my grief and pain, but also the lovingkindness that I experience as Jung’s “infinite.” In this I find the potential to heal not only my own pain, but the dissonance that stands between “Us” and “Them.”

Timothy Snyder’s powerful treatise, On Tyranny, suggests that we “practice corporeal politics” as a means to achieve liberation. While he is referring primarily to protests, marches, and rallies, we can also practice corporeal politics by “building,” as Prentis Hemphill says, a body “that can sustain action over time…something different from the distractible, unmoored body manipulated by social media.5”

Embodying truth: a practice

Many of us are familiar with the idea of intention-setting from our yoga classes. Our yoga teacher may ask us to set an intention before we practice. This can be as personal or global as you like (I once had a student set an intention to find her lost cell phone, which she later did!), but there’s a particular potency in setting an intention that is bigger than us.

“Thus all the physical world is

the pure body of enlightenment;

Hearing all sound is

the pure speech of enlightenment;

Experiencing all the movements of mind is

the pure mind of enlightenment.”

– Indian Mahāsiddha Kukkuripa

We can set an intention simply to embody what is important to us (compassion, love, God, truth, the infinite); we can ask that principle to work through us; we can ask that our actions be meaningful, purposeful, useful; we can ask that our own suffering and grief transform others’; we can use whatever words we like, as long as they resonate with us.

Using our imagination, we can ask that through our bodies, we effect change not only in ourselves, but in the world (as with Ton Glen practice; you can read more and practice with me here).

We might set an intention at the beginning of our day, just taking a quiet moment for ourselves. Or we can make this more of a ritual by lighting a candle, or invoking a prayer. We can return to this intention again and again throughout the day, if we like. Keeping a reminder near us (a special stone, or statue, or piece of jewelry) can help keep us centered.

“Biceps for Buddha,” or whatever

There’s no reason why intention-setting should be limited to yoga, or meditation practices. Infusing meaning into movement practice isn’t new, after all. “Muscular Christianity” was quite popular in the late 1800s in the US and Britain (ultimately, and problematically, contributing to the moralization of health in western culture, but that’s another post). In fact, a Christian Pilates place opened in my town not too long ago. Why not?

Lama Willa, in her beautiful book The Wakeful Body, suggests that we can transform any movement practice into sadhana (spiritual practice) by beginning with the following intention:

My body is the body of all beings.

May I breathe for all beings.

May I move for all beings.

May I become awakened for all beings.6

As you can see from the image at the head of this post, I do most of my movement practice in the room where my altar is. I light incense, a candle, and set the intention, and then bang out some reps, or whatever.

We are always embodying something. What we choose to embody— how we infuse intention into our lives— can help bridge the gap between where we are, as humans, as a community, and where we’d like to be.

Fairytales, according to Jungian thought, offer a kind of map to archetypes and psychic processes. Through them, we can recognize timeless patterns of individuation and the challenges we face along our road to psychic growth.

This week I wanted to talk about a fairytale motif that appears in many different fairytales (such as Amor and Psyche, Vasalisa the Wise, and versions of Cinderella). — sorting the seeds. Here, the heroine is asked to perform an impossible task overnight: to sort an enormous pile of seeds, the mildewed ones from the clean, or the chickpeas from the corn.

This can be understood as a metaphor for our ability to discriminate what is right for us; what is nurturing versus what would make us ill; a task that comprises a thousand tiny decisions, altogether overwhelming. As we discussed last week, managing our own health, caring for our own psyche, can truly feel like an impossible task. Who can manage this?

Well, as a matter of fact, the heroine doesn’t have to do it all by herself. In these tales, she accomplishes the task with the help of an animal (a cow, a bird, an ant) or a doll— her instinct, which operates at night, while she sleeps (that is, unconsciously!). She has to learn to listen to, and trust, this tiny voice, in order to complete the task.

But it’s not just about the instincts; we can also understand this theme as encouraging us to develop our feeling function. Feeling (according to Jung), is not about emotions, but about how we value something. It is the opposite of thinking. For example, if I am going to make a decision about where to go on vacation, I can use my thinking function (weighing the pros and cons), or I can rely on feeling, which says, “I like Sedona better than Vermont.”

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The feeling function is itself under-developed in our rationalistic/ materialistic culture. We would rather know why someone wants to do something— “I like Sedona” isn’t enough of a reason. So, developing our feeling function is a task that many of us struggle with.

This is further complicated by the way, as modern humans, we’ve become disconnected from our instinctual selves. We rely so heavily on external advice about what to eat, how to move, and how we should live, that we have lost that connection to the small animal voice inside that knows what’s nurturing for us— or, at a more basic level, even that we’re hungry at all.

And while many of us are natural-born “feelers” 🙋🏼‍♀️ (rather than “thinkers”), we may have had to adapt strategies of setting aside our own needs and instincts in service of others’ needs. “What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t know, whatever you want.”

(The fact that the protagonists in these tales are gendered female— one of many social identities that is often acculturated to subvert its own needs— may give us a clue here, too!)

Learning to “sort our seeds”

In the video above, I show an exercise— called “sorting the seeds”!— from Cornelia Albrecht’s “Guided Drawing” techniques that we can explore as a means to experience that sense of fine discernment in our bodies (if this looks familiar, it’s because we used it to explore anger in this post):

Beyond this, how can we practice “sorting the seeds” in our own lives? We can start small, with our next meal. What do I like to eat? What do I not like? Or, we can notice how we feel in our movement practice: this feels good. This does not feel good. We can notice (without shaming ourselves) when we simply do not know. That’s a good beginning.

Finally, we can be inspired by the animals in our lives, who are so much closer to their instincts (and who often symbolize our “instinctive selves” in our dreams!) They eat when they’re hungry and sleep when they’re tired. They bark at the FedEx man and wag at their friends. They hiss when you touch them “wrong,” or meow for affection. These instincts are alive in us, too.

Fairytales and myths (alive and well in movies and tv shows!) hold truths that transcend culture, time and place. The developmental task of “sorting the seeds” is one that we can all practice. Knowing what is right for us isn’t easy when we’re bombarded with advice and images of idealized others— but it’s key to finding real satisfaction in our lives.

“One should be willing to make mistakes cheerfully. The most perfect analysis cannot prevent error. Sometimes you must go into error; moreover, the moral things in you cannot come out until you give them a chance. The recognition of truth cannot come to daylight till you have given yourself a chance to err. I believe firmly in the role that darkness and error play in life.”

—Jung, C. G.. Introduction to Jungian Psychology : Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given In 1925

“Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”

—Buffalo Springfield. “For What It’s Worth.” Buffalo Springfield, Atco Records, 1966.

The Shame-based business model

Last night I dreamed:

I’m working for the call center/bank. An elderly woman calls in; she has overdrawn her accounts. She is 80+ years old and she and her husband use their money to support their grandchildren. It is easy to see it was just a mistake and I would like to give her back the money ($32x3). But I know I need to tell her no. Later, I call her back and refund the money. I don’t care what happens with that manager.

In reality, I worked for this bank for over a decade; this type of call was a daily occurrence. An error of a few cents could cost a client thousands in overdraft fees. And our official policy was never to refund them, unless it was a bank error. “I’m so sorry,” we’d have to say. “I’m not able to refund those fees.” Sometimes we’d go to our manager, or the branch manager, and try to intercede. “This is how the bank makes money,” we’d be told. “This is how we stay profitable.”

This is one type of shame-based business model: the bank is counting on you to screw up so that it makes money. The implication is that if you overdraw your account— no matter the circumstances— you’ve made a mistake. And mistakes are personal failures that merit punishment in the form of overdraft fees.

Some of our customers would be too ashamed to even ask for the money back. But at $32 per item, and $5 a day (I’m sure these fees have increased since then), they often had no choice. “How am I supposed to pay this??” they’d say. “My social security check doesn’t come in for two weeks and it won’t even cover it!” Sorry, but that’s how it works.

Et tu, yoga?

When I left the bank to buy a yoga studio, I didn’t know much at all about running a business. But one thing I did know was that I never wanted people to feel shamed in doing business with me.

It seems like banking and teaching yoga should be diametrically opposed, but they share an underlying ethos. In a neoliberal economy like mine (I live in the United States), which emphasizes market-based solutions to social and economic life, the individual assumes responsibility for their own success or failure. Any business that provides services to individuals can capitalize on this sense of personal responsibility; shame-based marketing becomes the norm.

Shame-based marketing in the wellness industry is so common we often don’t even recognize it as such. “Look your best for summer,” “Tone up and slim down,” “New Year, New You,” “Be your best self,” “What happens when you do yoga every day for 30 days? (with a list of benefits),” are all messages designed to suggest there is a better version of you available, if you would just purchase these services.

This shame-based messaging is built directly into the programs and services themselves. Results are guaranteed— as long as you follow the protocols exactly. If you fail to achieve optimal health/lose the weight/heal from the trauma, it must be because you didn’t do something right.

On an individual level, this ethos of personal responsibility creates the illusion of agency-- after all, we can all “choose” to “take better care” of ourselves, right?-- while keeping us locked into systems that will never allow us to succeed. It reinforces a self-concept of ourselves as flawed, broken, failures at every step.

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When I purchased the yoga studio, I didn’t have a clear understanding of these underlying dynamics. I just knew there were some things that didn’t quite feel right to me. Within yoga classes themselves, I’d become frustrated with teachers telling me how things “should” feel, or that I “should be able to” do a pose in a certain way. If I couldn’t do it, well, clearly that was a personal failure.

That’s why one of the first things I did after completing my initial yoga teacher training was to certify in “Curvy Yoga,” with Anna Guest-Jelley. What an incredible course that was— not only did I learn to make my classes more accessible, but it opened my eyes to how larger patterns of oppression were being replicated in yoga classes, in yoga studios, in marketing.

Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong

I’ve spoken to countless other practitioners who also struggled with this: how do we market our services in a way that feels authentic? How can we stay aligned with our sense of personal integrity? How do we express ourselves in a way that values others’ inherent worth, autonomy and dignity?

Social media algorithms reward extreme, fear-based language (“The one thing other coaches get wrong;” or “What your yoga teacher isn’t telling you”). If we want to stand out, if we want to make our viewpoint heard, it can feel like we have to point out where everyone else is wrong so that we can be right.

I find this is especially true in left-leaning, liberal spaces, where we are brutally quick to cancel each other— making ourselves look and feel more virtuous in the process. In this version of fear and shame-based marketing, we’re shaming each other, or just “that other liberal who isn’t being as liberal as I am,” in order to garner more followers, more sign-ups, more recognition.

Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and On Freedom), says of the political left:

“(T)oo many of us, too much of the time are trying to make ourselves 100% right by showing that someone else is not right. And that, you know, that drains a lot of our time and energy.”

From The Archive Project: Timothy Snyder in Conversation, Nov 11, 2025

Scrolling through social media (even Substack!) can feel like a room full of people screaming about how wrong everyone else is. Like the Buffalo Springfield song— “Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”

There’s got to be another way.

Jung’s de-pathologizing approach

Our culture is sick. The mental and physical health systems in my country (the US) are almost laughably bad— except that there’s nothing funny about people dying due to lack of care. And each of us, regardless of health, socioeconomic status, etc., is left to feel we are responsible for our own wellbeing: an impossible task.

This preys on a natural developmental human process: when a child is faced with environmental failure, it does not blame the system or the caregiver for the failure— the child blames itself. When our culture tells us that we are the problem; that anxiety, depression, psoriasis, whatever, is due to our own flawed self-care, we react with reflexive, internalized shame.

In contrast to this approach, Jung believed that all symptomology is a natural attempt at healing; that each of us is always trying to achieve not just homeostasis, but healing and growth. We’re anxious, we’re depressed, we have a skin condition because something in our body/psyche is trying to communicate a problem so that we can address it. This strength-based approach aligns with the Tibetan Buddhist teaching that each of us is inherently good; that even our most egregious mistakes are just misguided attempts to find our way back to the state of wholeness that is our birthright.

Our current approach to wellness isn’t working. Recognizing that our systems of care aren’t supporting us, we’re trying to treat ourselves; outsourcing care to hacks we learn from TikTok videos and ChatGPT. .

But we don’t have to believe what the system tells us: that we are the problem; that we are to blame for our failure to thrive. What would change for each of us if we could recognize ourselves as human beings doing our best in a flawed system? If we didn’t feel, on some level, a sense of shame around our bodies, our symptoms, our less-than-optimal health? If we could learn to connect to our own embodied wisdom, rather than trying (over and over again) to impose someone else’s on it?

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From shame-based to strength-based marketing

For my fellow helping practitioners— perhaps this is how we transition from a shame-based business model to a strengths-based one. If we can accept, with humility, that we don’t necessarily know what’s best for our clients, but that we can empower them to find that in themselves; if we can use our own expertise in service of the organic process of their own individuation process; if we can trust that the agency, means, and manner of their healing (mistakes included!) is determined by their psyche, not ours— maybe we could actually relax a little bit and stop efforting so damn hard.

Acknowledging our clients’ agency and innate wholeness doesn’t mean that the burden of the healing is on them alone. In fact, our relational support is essential. And, in this model, it’s incumbent on us to acknowledge the challenges and shortcomings of help the larger ecosystem of culture that can create external obstacles and internal complexes.

It also means that we need to address our own complexes— money, inferiority, savior, etc.— which contribute to the web of shame-based marketing we find ourselves in. Can we trust that it’s enough to be grounded in our own integrity, and that following the breadcrumb-trail of our own individuation is the best way to support others in their process? That’s the question.

Returning to that dream of my overdrawn customer— there was a moment in that dream where I “knew” the “right” thing to do was to deny her the refund. This represents the ways in which it can “feel right” to do what our culture wants us to do, rather than what we know is right for us. When I woke up from the dream, I felt a lingering sense of relief that I’d followed my own inner guidance, rather than the system’s rules.

Of course, I don’t always get this right. Mistakes are an important part of the process, after all. As Jung said (above), “The recognition of truth cannot come to daylight till you have given yourself a chance to err.” But I know that as a consumer, when I’m presented with messaging and marketing that feels supportive and grounded, rather than shame-based, urgent, or wrong-making, I breathe a little easier. I feel more at ease in my body and empowered to make decisions.

What a brilliant antidote to that shame-based marketing.

And, on that note, I’ve also finally turned on paid subscriptions. Zero pressure zone here, people, free subscribers will continue to get all the same stuff— and, if you do decide to pay, you’ll get unlimited access to my streaming online studio ($20/month value), plus bonus content. No matter how you subscribe, I hope you know how much I appreciate you and our connection!

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It’s Christmas, 2025

Well, happy holidays, I guess? I can’t believe it’s Sunday again, let alone the-Sunday-before-Christmas. And while I’ve had a little more spaciousness this year in my schedule to bake some cookies, wrap some gifts, and even mail some cards for the first time in over a decade, man. It’s still a lot.

As ever, the holiday pressure is ON. We’re inundated with emails pushing gift ideas on us, each one more threatening and tense than the last (“WE NEVER DO THIS!” they swear, thrusting their low prices into your inbox, though they literally did it last year. “THERE’S STILL TIME TO SHIP!”, they insist.) You delete and delete, and yet the onslaught continues. Your Netflix home screen is full of sappy, silly holiday romances1. And, heaven help you if you need to go into any kind of retail environment-- the music, the decorations, the junk, the urgent desperation in the air-- it’s like a holiday assault. 

And, in a cruel twist, even folks who don’t celebrate Christmas have to deal with Christmas stress: 

Roughly one in five adults who celebrate traditionally Jewish holidays (23%) and those who celebrate other non-Christian holidays (20%) said they experience stress because the holiday season doesn’t reflect their culture, religion or traditions, compared with 7% of adults who celebrate traditionally Christian holidays. They also said they do not feel a part of what is considered “the holiday season” in the U.S. (45% of those celebrating Jewish holidays and 57% other non-Christian holidays vs. 29% Christian holidays) and that they worry they may be discriminated against for their religion, traditions or culture at this time of year (42% and 55% vs. 13%, respectively). (APA, 2023)

Maybe you love the holidays. Maybe this really is the hap-, happiest season of all. But for many folks, this is a pretty rough time. This same 2023 APA survey cited above showed that for 7% of the population, stress is lower this time of year. If that is you, I am so happy for you! But maybe you should keep reading, because it’s likely that you know someone who’s struggling. The same survey showed that 41% of the population is feeling more stressed at this time. And many of us experience a combo platter of emotions: 43% of the individuals polled use both positive and negative adjectives to describe their feelings around this season. For sure— like the time a few years ago where I found myself baking cookies and singing, under my breath, “It’s beginning to look a lot like ‘F*** this.”

It’s not you, it’s the complex

Let’s review what a “complex” is. In Jungian terms, a complex is a collection of symbols, images, and ideas that are clustered around a core theme. We all have complexes— a father/mother complex, an inferiority complex, a money complex, etc. And while everyone I know has some kind of parent complex (for example), these are individually tailored based on our history and personal experience. These complexes live in our unconscious psyche, for the most part, though we can see traces of them in our daily lives, and definitely in our dreams.

Occasionally, something will happen that signals to the complex, “It’s time to shine!” When a complex is triggered in us, it takes over our ego consciousness temporarily. Each complex has its own script; it acts like a program that directs our thoughts and behaviors, many of which may not align with our conscious values. We are in an altered state.

Now, there are some complexes that are so big, we share them as a culture. The Western Christmas Complex (I’ll just call it the Christmas Complex for short) is one that each of us is subject to, simply because we live in a culture dominated largely by both Christian and capitalist traditions. While we may not like or want to participate in these, we are subject to them: the Brenda Lee song playing at the grocery store. The Christmas pageant at your school growing up (or “holiday pageant,” but, wink wink, it has gifts and a tree). The emails, the commercials, the decorations in your neighborhood. Cultural complexes pack a one-two punch, because not only do you have your personal triggers, you’ve got a whole culture breathing down your neck about it, pushing your buttons. The Christmas complex is bigger than all of us.

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How do you experience the Christmas Complex?

To answer that, let’s take another look at this fascinating poll. This image shows causes of stress during the holiday season, which may help you to identify how your own Christmas complex shows up:

That first percentile— spending too much or not having enough money to spend— damn, that’s relatable. I know when my Christmas complex has me, because I find myself staying up late, visiting websites I wouldn’t normally visit, thinking about buying gifts for people that I really, really, don’t need to buy gifts for. Then there’s the stress of not finding “just the right gift.” And those are just the commercial aspects of the holiday.

The Christmas Complex promotes a shiny, perfect, unachievable vision of togetherness, affluence (think about those car commercials— who’s buying their spouse a car with a big bow on it??), abundance (overflowing gifts; a table laden with gleaming food); nostalgia (hindsight being 20/20, after all, we can easily remember things being perfect that never actually were); and a sense of total ease— somehow, this will all come together, perhaps with a few snowflakes and a holiday miracle, perhaps reunited with family (the real miracle being the fact that in this glowing, sparkling ideal, everybody gets along so well).

NOBODY IS HAVING THIS CHRISTMAS. IT IS NOT A THING YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO. And yet it is perpetuated by our culture so much that we can’t help but be affected by it. Whether we long for it, or feel excluded by it, or hate it, the Christmas Complex is powerful.

Jung noted that we know we’re in the grip of a complex when we feel its strong affective (emotional, somatic) qualities. What do you notice as you look at that poll? Do you feel tense, irritable? Sad, nostalgic? Are you dying for some eggnog? Do you feel heavy in your body, or urgent— like you need to go buy someone a gift, stat? When we are in the grip of a complex, we don’t feel like “ourselves.” And we may not notice until it passes.

Do you have a complex, or does the complex have you?

For many years, I didn’t recognize how my own Christmas Complex was operating, although people around me could definitely identify it (this is true of most complexes— we’re unaware, but our friends could tell us all about it, if we’d let them!). Every year, I would find myself in a cycle of over-spending; feeling depressed that I’d spent so much and still didn’t have gifts for all the people I wanted to give to; feeling like no matter what, I couldn’t do enough. No amount of tradition-following, baking, giving, or decorating could feed the yawning chasm of my Christmas Complex, which demanded that I always do more, more, more— and that it could never live up to the nostalgic ideal it upheld.

Recognizing the script, pattern, or program of your own Christmas Complex is the first step. What triggers you? Movies, songs, commercials, a date on the calendar, a text from a certain family member (you’re likely to find that your complex is tied in to other complexes— family, religion, money— making it even stickier!)? What is the experience of that in your body? Do you feel fast and anxious, or sluggish and depressed? Do you “overindulge” (whatever that means) or restrict yourself from pleasure to control the experience?

Once you’ve identified your triggers and patterns, we can start to interrupt the cycle. You may need to do something physical or deliberate to break the complex’s hold. Going for a walk, heading to the gym, or simply deciding you’ll wait until tomorrow before clicking “buy now” can be helpful.

When we are able to observe the complex, rather than lie helpless under its spell, we can make more conscious choices and see how they feel. James Hollis suggests that we ask ourselves, “Where am I complying with pressures from outside that compromise my values?” These pressures may be internalized— like the idea that you have to give the perfect gift— but they’re not intrinsic to who you are. Keeping in mind that for most, the Christmas Complex is short-lived and seasonal, you might ask yourself, how will you feel about your actions in a month? A year?

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The other pole of the Christmas Complex (and I don’t mean the South Pole—)

So far, I’ve been speaking about the Christmas Complex as a pretty negative experience. But we need to remember that all complexes have a positive and a negative aspect. For example, if you’re someone who does celebrate Christmas, the positive aspect might be the parts that really do feel good and connect you with your sense of spirituality, generosity, and connection. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, the positive aspect might be the drive to practice the traditions that are meaningful for you. Or if you experience anger as part of the complex, that may be a powerful catalyst to create personal (or community) change.

Complexes— especially, I think, cultural ones— contain an enormous amount of energy and vitality. When they remain unconscious, they act like an app on our phone that drains the battery; our energy is siphoned into their powerful pull. While we can’t get rid of our complexes, we can bring them into our conscious awareness. When they no longer “have us,” then we may find that we have more life force available to us again to use in ways that are more truly aligned with our own interests and values.

What’s your experience of the Christmas Complex? How do you work with it? Leave a comment below, if you like— and until next time, I wish you a December/January full of things that feel right for you.

I’d just left a meditation retreat, feeling as always both empty, hollowed-out by the experience of 10 days of practice— and, at the same time, brimmingly full; spiritually nourished, more aware than ever of the depth of my love and compassion.

Perhaps you imagine that a meditation retreat is a very cognitive experience; a sort of sit-on-the-cushion-and-tough-it-out-athon. And there certainly are moments like that. But in my (Tibetan Buddhist) tradition, it’s also an intense experience of feeling, devotion, and loving-kindness and compassion. Leaving the safe container of a retreat is always (for me, anyway), can be jarring, even after just a few days— things feel louder, bigger, sometimes overwhelming.

So, as I sat in the crowded terminal, waiting for my flight to be called, I was primed both to feel deeply, and to be intimately aware of my own experience in doing so.

I’m not sure at what moment I noticed it, or how. Maybe it was the excitement of the crowd, turning toward something that was happening overhead, or maybe I heard its cries myself. A tiny bird was flying desperately among the high-ceilinged metal rafters, crashing itself again and again into the hundreds of panes that stood between it and open air.

My heart dropped as I took it in: its swift, unerring path around the perimeter; its high, plaintive cries— and the answering cries of the birds gathered outside the windows, trying to call it home. And I did truly “take it in”— unintentionally— I felt its pain, its terror, its exhaustion, its confusion. I saw that although the flight attendants had opened the gate, the bird could not see its way out; it could only see the freedom it sought, but could never reach, through the glass that kept it prisoner.

In that moment, I was so open, unguarded, full of feral empathy: I could do nothing but feeling the complete terror and panic of this tiny animal and my own helpless despair of the situation.

What happens when we feel helpless?

What happens to you when you feel helpless? When you’re faced with another’s suffering? When you know there’s nothing you can do to improve their situation? What is called forth in us when we are faced with our own inability to help?

The scene in the MSP airport terminal that day provided a good snapshot of human strategies. Many of the humans treated it as a spectacle, “othering” the bird— they showed their children, “look at the bird!” Others— like one kindhearted flight attendant— went into problem-solving mode, crafting elaborate water and snack stations for the bird, should it choose to rest (“I bet it likes peanuts”). The gate attendants were weary and frustrated with the situation, tired of talking about it: “There’s nothing else we can do.” And most people, it seemed, only allowed themselves to take in the barest fact of the bird’s plight before turning away to distract themselves with phones or food.

So, faced with helplessness, we:

• Decide it is not our problem by moving away from, physically, or psychologically through “othering;”

• Distract, dissociate, or numb ourselves, so we don’t have to take it in;

• Feel angry, blaming others, or the “system;”

• Get caught in the others’ pain, feeling we need to take it on ourselves;

• Pressure ourselves to “figure it out,” taking responsibility for an outcome that we can’t possibly effect.

All of these strategies are meant to manage what feels like an unmanageable emotion.

Feral empathy is a terrifying thing

If you are someone in a helping profession— or someone who identifies as a highly sensitive person, an empath, etc.— you may sense that feeling deeply is a gift of yours.

You may also be someone who does not identify with this group, or who finds themselves bored, frustrated or angry in the face of helplessness, or others’ suffering.

In either case, our untrained, feral empathy is at the heart of our reactions in the face of helplessness; a complex that drives our behaviors in ways we may not consciously recognize.

We either feel so deeply we find it overwhelming, and engage in strategies to manage it— or we are so unwilling or unable to allow that feral empathy to surface that we will do almost anything not to feel it, using strategies of avoidance.

Helplessness, for many of us, can feel like terror. We may not have had a stable or safe-enough caregiver, or we may have been raised in a system or environment that was actively hostile to our identity. As tiny humans, if we do not have adequate external support, we will learn to disconnect from dangerous emotions (dissociation, for example), or to create strategies that allow us to survive the situation that causes them (like problem-solving, caretaking, or trying to control the environment). Perhaps we were told we were “too sensitive,” and we learned to close down that part of ourselves in order to be accepted. This doesn’t mean that we don’t feel deeply— in fact, the opposite is true— but that our empathy has had to go underground.

So it is that as adults, feeling helpless will constellate allllllll the survival strategies— while our feral empathy yowls and scratches at the door, outsized, untrained, and shredding our nerves with its needs.

We feel truly helpless because we cannot tolerate our own empathy

Let’s consider another situation where you might experience helplessness— someone tells you about their depression, or grief, or terminal illness. Do you feel pressure to “fix it” for them by offering suggestions? Do you feel you need to take responsibility for them or their experience? Is there a desperate need to change the subject, or are you praying someone else will walk up and save you from this interaction?

If you’re a helping professional, do you find yourself working harder than your client to fix their problems? Do you notice a need to be the authority who can provide answers? Do you get frustrated, or blame them for not following your suggestions in the first place? Do you blame, or shame yourself, for not being able to help them?

If you relate to any of these strategies, can you see how they may be protecting you from the pain of your own helplessness, or the terror of your own untrained empathy? Can you feel how exhausting it is to have to work so hard to manage that feeling?

That day, in the terminal, I felt the unbearable pain of the bird’s suffering. I felt that I was being torn to pieces. But in a way, this was a gift. The undeniable, factual, helplessness of the situation— there was literally nothing logistically to be done— there was no responsibility for me to take— left me with only my empathy to work with.

So I sat down, and I prayed1 for the bird:

May it have happiness.

May it be free from suffering.

May this suffering be meaningful.

May this suffering transform me.

As I repeated these words, and rested my mind with the emotion of helpless empathy, I felt space open around the pain. It became tolerable; workable. I felt my experience shifting. By the time I got on the plane, I didn’t experience less empathy for that bird; it had become more skillful, and functional.

In last week’s post on ton glen, I shared a practice that uses imagination to change our own perception of a situation (and, in doing so, to change reality itself). Similarly, in this practice of loving-kindness and compassion, I was transforming suffering into peace. I’m making a chaotic, painful situation meaningful.

Still, I know that in our materialistic2, rational culture, this all might feel like a massive waste of time. That bird was gonna die anyway, you might think. That’s a bunch of spiritual bypassing. I hear you, and my own skeptical heart can relate. So, from this point of view, let me say it this way:

This type of prayer, or meditation, is a means of training our own non-reactivity, openness, and authentic connection to others, even when their suffering is bigger than both of us. While the bird may not know that I’m offering it unconditional support, this skill is something that we can offer to all beings in our lives. Even if we are only decreasing our own suffering, we are decreasing the total suffering in the world.

Many years ago, I heard an interview with Matthew Sanford, in which he said, “I’m not afraid of my suffering. It’s what allows me to be with others without needing to fix them.” Perhaps you can recall a time when you were with someone who was able to accept you, and your own suffering, without “needing to fix” it. If so, then you’ve felt how this kind of presence is in itself a potent source of relief.

Our feral empathy exhausts us, leading to compassion fatigue and burnout. Like a forgotten Bluetooth device always seeking connection, it drains our battery. And the strategies we use to mask or avoid this feeling are endlessly exhausting; after all, we’re fighting our own nature.

Trained empathy, on the other hand, is enlivening. It connects us to our authentic selves— we are meant to love others— and it is completely effortless. There’s nothing special to do, nobody special to be; we can simply offer ourselves, and our empathetic presence. This is profoundly healing.

“If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so, and that the opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.”

-Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

Last week, I talked about why imagination is so powerful for transformation (and included a 5 minute movement practice!). This week, I wanted to build on that conversation by sharing an embodied meditation that I really love— ton glen (“sending and taking”) practice. This is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation technique that relies heavily on imagination to create change in our minds.

Traditionally, ton glen is done for another being, or for multiple beings. In the variation I’m sharing here— taught to me by Tergar instructor Tim Olmsted— we practice ton glen for a past version of ourselves, and as a future version of ourselves extending the practice to our current situation.

Share thoughts & feelings by laura beth wenger

As with all these practices, the idea is to loosen our habitual perception and begin to explore new ways of relating to ourselves and our experience. We’re also making a conscious choice to practice something different— recognizing that we have agency, and that we do not need to continue to do what we’ve always done.

As Mingyur Rinpoche says, the choice to experience ourselves differently is always available. Imagination helps us find it.

Let me know what you think in the comments— was this supportive for you? What was your experience?

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The results are in, and the 2025 Oxford word of the year is “rage bait.” Are we surprised?

Even if you’ve never heard the term, you probably know what “rage bait” is. It’s those all-caps, adrenaline-inducing headlines that get your blood boiling. How dare they, you think, as you read about what they’ve done this time.

Rage bait is defined by the organization as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”

They also note that usage of the term has tripled over the past 12 months— not entirely surprising, but, wow.

The two other terms that made the short list are also telling: “aura farming” and “biohack.”

“Aura farming,” Wikipedia says, is “the act of cultivating an appearance of effortless charisma or ‘coolness’, often through repetitive, stylized actions.”

The other contender was “biohack,” which really struck me, because I think and write about this a lot.

Oxford defines “biohack" as: “To attempt to improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.”

Rather than listen to our bodies and psyches, we spend countless hours and dollars attempting to control and optimize ourselves through biohacking.

Jung believed this led to serious imbalances:

“Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side”1

In tandem with this, the deliberate cultivation of persona-- “aura farming”-- has taken on disproportionate importance. While persona is a necessary part of any healthy psyche, over-identification with our persona is dangerous to ourselves and others. Not knowing who we are, we become imbalanced, inflated, and more prone to dangerous action:

Jung: “In this way (man) slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.”2

How does this relate to “rage bait?”

Jung said, “The dammed-up instinctual forces in civilized man are immensely destructive and far more dangerous than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living out his negative instincts. Consequently no war of the historical past can rival in grandiose horror the wars of civilized nations.”3

This is true not only on the larger-scale level— for example, in the US, war crimes are being committed casually as I write this— but on the macro level. Violence and death have become so commonplace that we barely blink at the latest mass shooting. And on an individual scale, each of us, if we continue to be divorced from our own instincts, from our sense of Self, are increasingly volatile; vulnerable to emotional manipulation:

“In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control,” Jung said, “We stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections.”4

What’s a girl to do?

Social media and the technological world we live in are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in splitting us off from our instinctive selves, and from authentic connection with the world and communities we live in.

This has deadly ramifications, not only for ourselves, but for those around us and the world we want to live in.

In this light, self-knowledge-- not necessarily “self-improvement” (which can easily veer into the “biohacking” realm), but really coming to know ourselves-- is not a luxury pastime.

I was tempted here to frame it as a moral imperative (a different kind of “aura farming” on my part, maybe), but I had to laugh as I paged through Jung’s Undiscovered Self this morning and it fell open to the passage where he tells me not to bother:

“There is no sense in formulating the task that our age has forced upon us as a moral demand. We can, at best, merely make the psychological world situation so clear that it can be seen even by the myopic, and give utterance to words and ideas which even the hard of hearing can hear. We may hope for men of understanding and men of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those thoughts and insights which are needed. Finally, even the truth can spread and not only the popular lie.” 5

What does it mean to be a person of “understanding and "good will”? Each of us has to find our own path. Journaling, art, dancing, time in nature, therapy, indigenous healing practices, less time online, attending to the needs of your body and psyche in whatever way you are called to do. I’ll wrap this up with one more Jung quote— this one more hopeful.

“What does lie within our reach, however, is the change in individuals who have, or create for themselves, an opportunity to influence others of like mind. I do not mean by persuading or preaching— I am thinking, rather, of the well-known fact that anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment.”6

What we each do makes a difference.