How Healing Happens Podcast

I invited my readers to send me their questions about somatic healing and have answered them here in video format. A list of the questions addressed is below.

If, after watching this video, you have further comments or questions please drop them in the comments, or if it feels to private you can feel free to DM me.

In my first year of graduate school one of our required classes was poetry therapy. As a child I loved writing poetry so you might be surprised that seeing this class on my schedule make me break out in a cold sweat. There have always been two things with the ability to break me open: music and poetry. Even though when I entered graduate school I thought I had finished all of my healing work, some part of me knew there were dark recesses that I had not explored and poetry was likely to shine light onto them.

I wasn’t wrong.

The class was led by poet and therapist John Fox, founder of the The Institute for Poetic Medicine. John is a gentle wizard and knows how to create a container where we could peer into those dark places while still feeling held.

One poem I wrote in the class was about my experience with childhood sexual abuse. Somehow I knew it needed to be witnessed and I asked John for permission to read it to the class. (I won’t share the poem here because there’s a difference between reading something to a classroom and sharing it with 10,000 people, and I’m not quite ready for that level of exposure.)

Halfway through I was sobbing. The kind of ugly cry we usually reserve for the bathroom or when we are in bed hiding under the covers. John asked if I wanted to stop, but I knew I needed to keep going.

Afterward I had a vulnerability hangover. I felt shaky and wondered whether I had gone too far. What really caught me off guard was that every person in the class came up to me to offer encouragement and to share something of their own experiences. I think that was the moment I realized just how common sexual abuse is. One woman asked for a copy of the poem to use in her own work and I was happy to give it to her.

The reason that moment was so powerful was not the writing of the poem. It was the act of being witnessed.

What Happens when Someone Actually Sees you

Years later as a licensed trauma therapist, I created a group called Survivors for women who had experienced sexual violence. The purpose of the group was not to retell stories, but to be witnessed in a way that goes beyond narration of an event. Retelling can actually reinforce traumatic patterns in the brain, but being witnessed can teach the brain new pathways.

In the Survivors group, a consistent pattern I noticed was one woman sharing something, then the others sighing with relief and sharing some version of “I thought I was the only one!”

I have believed for a long time that being witnessed is one of the most powerful aspects of healing. It is also one of the least examined. We tend to talk about it as a thing that happens alongside the real work but maybe it is more than that.

Here's what the research says…

The most consistent finding in psychotherapy outcomes research is not about technique or modality but about the relationship between client and therapist.

But what is it exactly that does the healing? Is it warmth? Hope? Simply not being alone?

We are built to be wary of what other people tell us. That caution is protection and it only softens when we are seen accurately and in our wholeness, with someone reflecting our inner state back to us in a way that tells us that they deeply listened and understood. Until that happens, nothing really gets in.

The very experience of having our subjectivity understood — of being mentalized — is a necessary trigger for us to be able to receive and learn from social knowledge.

— Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Allison

Now, read that again with childhood trauma in mind.

If early life experiences taught you that people consistently misread you or used what you shared against you, you end up with more than just some painful memories but also an inability to receive. The channel of nourishment stays closed with the nice teacher or the good friend who might otherwise have been able to offer needed support. Truly excellent therapy not only teaches you skills, but reopens that channel so that you become available to receive and your life becomes a source of learning again.

We are hurt in relationship, and we heal in relationship.

That is the mechanism.

Not Every Witness is Safe

Many survivors of childhood trauma go through a period of having an intense urge to share their story. I understand the urge, and I always encourage caution and discernment during this time.

An analysis completed in 2019 reviewed 51 studies on what happens after survivors disclose interpersonal violence to others. Negative social reactions were associated with worse psychological outcomes, which is predictable. What was less predictable is that while positive reactions were helpful, that helpfulness did not outweigh harms of a negative reaction.

In other words, a good witness helps, but a bad witness does damage that a good one may not be able to undo.

The worst situation is stepping into vulnerability with someone who is not emotionally safe, or who may be safe but not prepared to hold what you have to share. In the later case your disclosure may trigger them in a way you could not have predicted and that isn’t fair to them. Either way, you are left feeling raw and more deeply wounded than before. The nervous system of a complex trauma survivor often can't tell the difference between safe and unsafe, because familiarity and safety were fused in the mind of the survivor and have never been disentangled. The person who feels most familiar may end up being the least safe.

This hints at one of the reasons I am cautious about AI chatbots as substitutes for therapy. AI can feel genuinely empathetic and seemingly attuned to your own inner emotional state. A Brown University team named this “deceptive empathy”. For a person who experienced relational injury this could actually deepen the existing wound.

Becoming Your Own Witness

There is a step beyond being witnessed by another person that is even more profound. Offering witness to yourself. I often talk with my clients about developing a witnessing self: a simultaneously compassionate and dispassionate part of us that can step back and hold all of the complexity of a situation at once, without becoming entangled with any of it. The witnessing self is key to developing cognitive and emotional flexibility, one of the hallmarks of a truly healthy individual.

The witnessing self is cultivated in Buddhist practice as well as in Internal Family Systems, which names it the capital-S-Self. The difference between being blended with an emotional state and offering self witnessing is the difference between “I am afraid” and “I’m noticing a sense of fear”. They sound similar, but in the second version there is a gap between the emotion and the person. Within that gap lies freedom.

When you live inside a narrative of a thing that happened, it can dominate and run (ruin) your life. Alternatively, you can simply notice and experience what is showing up at any given moment, whether it is a thought, a sensation or a feeling. The witnessing self does the latter. It’s simple, but not easy.

Neurologically speaking, it takes more energy to suppress a reactive emotional state (I will NOT be afraid) than to witness it (I’m noticing some fear). In other words, it costs less to observe an emotional state than to fight yourself on it.

In my experience, the witnessing self is also accessible in ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP), and this is one of its great benefits. In ketamine work a person is dissociated from their body and able to gain a wider perspective, like taking the 30,000 foot view of a situation. In one of my early experiences with my own KAP work I was able to step back and witness my own fear without feeling like I was drowning in it. While there are benefits to doing intentional ketamine work, I'm not advocating it without reservation. The dramatic increase in recreational use of ketamine and subsequent addiction is reason enough to exercise extreme caution, though that is not the only reason. Plainly said, psychedelics are not meant for everyone.

Sequencing Matters

It might seem tempting to skip over finding a safe witness and go straight to self witnessing. But there is a catch. You can't witness yourself in a way that you have never been witnessed by another. Building an internal capacity for witnessing is not a workaround to skip the relational capacity.

The internal witness is the relational witness that has been integrated into Self.

By the time I read my poem to the poetry therapy class, I had already done years of my own trauma healing work. Even so, I did not have the capacity to offer witnessing to myself, until my classmates offered it to me first.

When Someone Deeply Listens to You by John Fox

When someone deeply listens to youit is like holding out a dented cupyou’ve had since childhoodand watching it fill up withcold, fresh water.When it balances on top of the brim,you are understood.When it overflows and touches your skin,you are loved.

When someone deeply listens to youthe room where you staystarts a new lifeand the place where you wroteyour first poembegins to glow in your mind’s eye.It is as if gold has been discovered!

When someone deeply listens to youyour bare feet are on the earthand a beloved land that seemed distantis now at home within you.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Here is your companion practice guide:

Meeting the One Who Witnesses

A guided parts work dialog for strengthening the Witnessing Self

For this practice you'll need to set aside 30 to 40 minutes and you'll need a pen and paper. I recommend hand writing rather than typing as it makes it more visceral and potent.

The Safety Gate Questions

This practice deliberately brings you into contact with a part of you that is holding something difficult. That's useful only if there is enough of you present to do the witnessing. If there isn't, you risk flooding.

So before continuing ask yourself these questions:

* Can I feel my feet on the ground? Press your feet into the floor and notice the pressure. If you have a difficult time connecting with the sensation then do this practice another time.

* If this gets difficult and I need support, who can I reach for? Identify an actual person you will contact and make sure they can be available for you.

* Am I doing this from a state of internal urgency? Urgency is a yellow flag. A part of you that wants to speed through is most often a protector part. If you notice a sense of urgency, work with the protector part first.

* Am I feeling physically healthy, have I eaten the right foods and am I sober? This question is mundane… and non-negotiable.

Disclaimer: If you are in a state of crisis, in the first weeks after a life disruption, or moving through a period of destabilization, don't do this alone. Bring it to your therapist and do it with them.

Finding the Center

Start by placing your feet on the ground and take three breaths, with a longer exhale than the inhale. The exhale engages the parasympathetic nervous system and tells your system to relax.

Orient yourself in your space by looking around the room and naming five three things that you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel (touch) and one thing you can smell or taste.

At the top of your piece of paper write the following:

Right now I am the one who is noticing.

The Dialog

In this dialogue we are going to work with one part only, not a complex problem. If this is your first time doing parts work, choose something with an easy to medium level of difficulty. Don't begin with the youngest and most wounded part in you - that is the graduate level course.

* Locate the part: Begin to get curious about where this part lives in the body. Most parts have a location, such as behind the sternum, in the shoulders, or in the jaw. If you don't notice a location within the body, ask the part whether it has an image, an age, a posture, or a quality. On your paper, write down where this part is and what it feels like.

* Focus your attention on the part: Place your attention on the location or description of the part and leave it there for 1 to 2 minutes without trying to change anything. Just stay fully present with it.

* Flesh it out: Now on your piece of paper, take some time to really write out the details. (Don’t ask “why” questions since they tend to recruit the thinking mind, which is unhelpful in this process.)

* How old does this part feel?

* What does it look like or feel like?

* What is it doing?

* What is it braced against?

* Feel toward the part: ask yourself, how do I feel toward this part right now? This is important, so really slow it down and get curious and honest without any self judgment. Write out your answer.

* If you noticed a lot of judgmental thoughts like "I'm sick of it, I want it gone, it's pathetic, I don't have time for this" or it feels like you're stuck and just staring at a blank page, then you are blended with a second part that has an opinion about the first one. This is completely normal and it can happen even to experience practitioners.

* If this happens don't try and force it or push through. Turn toward the critical or impatient second part and communicate with that one instead. You might even ask if it would be willing to sit back a little bit and give you some space to work with the first part. Then wait until you notice a shift. You might notice reduced tension in your chest or breathing a little bit more freely, for example.

* Re-read what you wrote at the very top of the page: right now I am the one who was noticing. Then come back to the centering and orienting process from part one. Don't move on to the next step until you have a felt sense of the part that you want to work with.

* Befriend the part: This is the longest part of the journaling exercise. Ask the part each of these questions and give it plenty of space to respond in writing.

* How long have you been doing this job?

* What are you worried of happening if you stop doing the job?

* What do you most need me to know right now?

* What do you most want from me right now?

* Close with gratitude: It's important to properly close any parts work exercise with gratitude and acknowledgment. Take a deep breath with a long, extended exhale.

* Next on your paper write: You have been doing this since I was [age] and no one ever told you that it was safe to stop. Thank you for doing your best to protect me.

* Then write down what you can offer to that part, such as “I will check in with you once a week” or whatever feels right. It is important not to promise anything you don’t feel you can commit to. Parts are like children and they remember broken promises.

* Lastly, re-oriented yourself using the process from Step One.

Recognizing When “witnessing self” is Actually a Part

With enough time and repetition, you may develop something that looks like a witnessing self but is actually a part. It is calm, articulate, and fluent in the language of parts work. It can be tricky to tell the difference.

There are a few telltale signs you can watch for to see if it may be a part and not Self:

* It answers very quickly. Almost like it wants to move on to the next step before having a chance to breathe. Real self energy is doesn’t move that fast.

* It's slightly impatient, something like "we've been over this already, can't we just move to the next thing?”

* You realize that you're not tracking your body and physical sensation, or that nothing in your body is shifting during the process.

* Afterward you feel buttoned up rather than tender. Parts work is vulnerable and if you have worked with Self energy you may need a little time to rest afterward.

Any of these signs could indicate that you're actually working with an intellectualizing protector part that is pretending to be the witness. The most important test is somatic, not verbal or cognitive. Genuinely witnessing from the Self has kind of warmth to it and a physical softening. Cold clarity is a defense. Warm clarity is the center.

If you notice the cool, intellectualizing protector part that's OK. Thank you for protecting you and then go back to Step Four.

The Third Person Journaling Option

For days when you're having a lot of difficulty connecting with Self and finding your center, or when one of the safety gates say ‘no’, you can use this option. This comes out of the research by Kross and Moser who found that reflecting on difficult material using a third person view reduces emotional reactivity.

Write three or four sentences in your journal about what is happening right now using the third person voice. Instead of writing "I", write "he/she/they" and then describe the situation like if a friend was describing it.

For example, I might write something like “Linnea is really frustrated today. She is noticing tension in her shoulders, a tightness in her jaw and tearws behind her eyes. She realizes that she is harboring an old resentment…”

It's an incredibly simple practice but it's powerful but because it helps you find some distance from identification with the feeling. This is the beginning of witnessing. If you spend just 2 to 5 minutes doing this daily, you'll be able to find your center and access Self much more easily in subsequent sessions.

Meeting the One Who Witnesses

The companion practice is for paid subscribers. It is a guided parts work dialogue for building a witnessing self that includes:

* A four question safety gate for deciding whether today is the right time for this work

* How to recognize the difference between Self and a part

* A six step dialogue for unblending with a part

* What to do when the Witnessing Self is inaccessible

Upgrade to get the guide (and everything else):

From my heart to yours

New here? I’m a scientist-turned-psychotherapist and I write about healing, trauma, and psychospiritual growth at the intersection.

Love what you are reading? Restack or share it with a friend

If you recognize your own spiral in this work and you’re wondering whether you need to do this alone — you don’t. I offer psychospiritual coaching for people doing deep healing work. Let’s Talk →

I invited my readers to send me their questions about healing trauma and have answered them here in video format. A list of the questions addressed is below.

If, after watching this video, you have further comments or questions please drop them in the comments, or if it feels to private you can feel free to DM me.

If you have additional questions you would like me to address in the next AMA session, please also leave them here or send them to me in a DM.

Subscriber Questions:

* How can we stay in a sensitive empath’s body, triggered by so much happening on the planet, and walk the path???

* Please address the trope of “the body never lies” can be so dangerous and add to chasms in relationships with others and the self. How does one unlearn?

* My question is, in your experience with EMDR, assisted psychedelic therapies, embodiment, creativity, energy work and TRE, what emerges as most effective in rewiring the limbic brain? This is a curiosity question, since for me, each one has been an ingredient in what has become a nourishing soup.

* One area I’d love to hear you unpack is the relationship between self-betrayal and self-sabotage. Those themes have been very alive for me lately, especially how they can become deeply embodied patterns rather than simply “bad decisions.” I’m also curious about how these dynamics can show up within organized systems, particularly religious communities. How do shame, subtle silencing, image management, and diffuse accountability shape a person’s nervous system over time? And how can someone begin to recognize and disentangle from those patterns without simply swinging into cynicism or rebellion.

* I’d love to know more about psychedelic psychotherapy and eating disorders…

I read constantly as a child. It was how I “left” the house (and my body) without actually leaving it. What I reached for were fairytales and myths, which in hindsight I don't think was an accident. I was looking for the part of the story when a savior arrives.

In 1968 a psychiatrist named Stephen Karpman published a paper called “Fairytales and Script Drama Analysis”. He was working in transactional analysis, and he noticed that the same three roles kept turning up in children’s stories. He called them the prosecutor, the rescuer, and the victim and placed them in what he named the Drama Triangle.

He used examples of the Pied Piper, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella to demonstrate the triangle, and saw that fairytales teach children the norms of society on the surface while underneath they hand them a small set of defined roles to occupy. Like most children, I accepted the roles without ever having a conscious awareness of them.

As a therapist, I came to learn that something was missing from the triangle.

In Cinderella, the stepmother and stepsisters are the prosecutors (or perpetrators), and Cinderella is the victim. The fairy godmother is the rescuer.

But what about Cinderella's father? The triangle neglects to name a role for him.

The Trauma Triangle and the Bystander Role

The correlate to Karpman’s Drama Triangle is the Trauma Triangle, victim-perpetrator-rescuer. And the missing fourth role in trauma is that of the bystander, the one who observed but did not act. Petruska Clarkson named The Bystander Role in her article by the same name published in 1987, expanding on Karpman’s model.

The role of bystander is hidden from view and usually the most painful role for trauma survivors to acknowledge. Cinderella’s father was a bystander. Either the bystander knew of the harm and did not act, or as in the story with Cinderella, they did not know and they should have.

Anyone who has experienced trauma has played more than one, if not all of these roles. These days, I don’t honestly know anyone who is trauma-free.

But then again, I am a trauma therapist.

The Victim Role

The victim is the person who was harmed. That is a real thing and I am not dismissing it… far from it. But we can get stuck in the role of victim until the helplessness that we once experienced becomes our identity. The unhealed victim seeks sympathy and avoids accountability. They crave rescue and give away their agency, often placing blame in order to avoid responsibility. Healing the victim part involves moving from helplessness to agency, from victim to creator. When the victim shifts their focus toward creativity, which is the essence of vitality and life energy, something deep inside changes. When we begin to create, we unlock blocked energy and allow it to flow again.

The work of the victim is to reclaim AGENCY.

I experienced a traumatic childhood. It's the reason I chose to specialize in trauma when I entered the field of psychology. As a child I often fantasized about a rescuer, just like in the fairytales that I lived in. I buried my nose in a book to escape, and my mom used to say that when I was reading a bomb could go off and I would never notice. When I moved past my fairytale stage, I began to fantasize about someone in real life coming to rescue me. I tried placing my first husband in the rescuer role, and then later my first therapist. Eventually I learned that the only one who could "rescue" me was me, by connecting with Self, holding myself accountable to integrity and setting healthy boundaries.

Blame never solved any problem and usually only makes it worse.

The Perpetrator Role

The perpetrator is the one who harmed the victim. And yes, there are real and dangerous perpetrators in the world. We can begin to have compassion for perpetrators by understanding that they came to this role through their own experiences. Healing the perpetrator part involves moving from blamer and controller to responsibility and challenger. The perpetrator blames, criticizes, controls, and attacks. Their underlying fear is that of being victimized, because they once were.

The work of the perpetrator is to move into ACCOUNTABILITY.

Now, I would love to sit here behind my keyboard and claim that I never played this role, but that would not be true. And since my writing is part teaching, part empathizing, and part confessional I will share that I have caused harm in my life. I won't try and explain it away or excuse it but rather take accountability for it here in my writing, just as I did in those moments in my life. I used to be the owner of a healthcare clinic. We'd like to imagine that therapists are more human than others, but that's simply not true. There was a conflict between me and one of the therapists that slowly escalated until I blew up at her in a meeting and said, “You wanna see boundaries? I'll show you boundaries.” That was years ago and I'm still ashamed of that moment.

As part of healing my perpetrator part, I must take accountability for those times.

The Rescuer Role

The rescuer plays the role of "the good guy" in the triangle. They're the one that comes to save, what one of my clients called "Captain Save-A-Ho”. She would don her rescuer cape when she felt out of control in her own life. Healing the rescuer part involves moving from fixer to carer or coach. For the unhealed rescuer, their self-worth depends on the rescuing which places them in a self-perceived "one up" position. They often do this without being asked, like the advice giver, and this can maintain the victim’s dependence.

The work of the rescuer is to SUPPORT without fixing.

I distinctly recall a moment in a meeting when I worked in biotech marketing and I perceived our CEO to be bullying a coworker. I called him out in public even though the coworker never asked for (or needed) my help. Not my wisest move professionally, but I survived it and learned from it.

Helping professions are particularly susceptible to the rescuer. In my first placement as a therapist intern in the San Francisco Bay Area, I worked with a very ill and deeply traumatized woman. I had a dream one night of saving her from an earthquake. This was not a subtle message, but it was an excellent growth edge and I began to learn how to hold without needing to "save”.

The Bystander Role and the “Safe” parent

Look at the three roles we just examined side-by-side and you'll notice that they all are making a similar move in their healing process. Victim to Creator. Rescuer to Coach. Perpetrator to Challenger. The healing shift comes from David Emerald’s The Empowerment Dynamic, a common companion to Karpman’s model. It is a step out of a position that requires someone else to be a certain way, and into a position that requires internal alignment.

The fourth role is a little different. The other three roles are all doing something. Karpman was mapping an interpersonal dynamic — who is acting on whom — and he built a map that cannot see the person standing outside the transaction. Healing the bystander role is done by becoming an active witness, not by moving into rescuer mode, but also not turning away. In my next article I will explore the power of witnessing.

The work of the bystander is to WITNESS without looking away.

One reason I think the fourth role was missed originally is that most of us would rather not look at it. Because the bystander was the one who did nothing when they could have.

(I want to be very clear that sometimes we literally can not do anything. That is not what I’m speaking of here. That position is more similar to the victim than to the bystander.)

When there has been abuse by a parent, the bystander is the "safe" parent, and that makes it more painful to come to the awareness of the harm of inaction. Before I became a therapist, a dear friend shared with me about the severe abuse she experienced from her father, along with her siblings. She described it like this:

“It was like my father was the guard at the concentration camp. But my mom was the one who drove the train”.

I simultaneously went cold with the recognition of the bystander role before I had a word for it, and also felt deep knowing of this as a truth that very few people are able to name.

In my life, my mother was willfully blind to the harms that were happening, and to this day she is unable to acknowledge the impact of her inaction and abandonment. My mother was the bystander in my story. I simultaneously hold compassion for her experiences as an abused child that shaped her into the person she became, and compassion for my child-self who needed protection she did not receive.

This is what Jung calls tension of opposites, and it is where the healing power is the greatest but it is also one of the most difficult positions to hold.

Holding the Paradox of the Bystander

(for paid subscribers)

Set aside time where you have privacy and won't be disturbed for at least 20 minutes. Have a journal close by for this practice.

Take a couple of deep, slow breaths through the nose and out through the mouth.

Bring to mind the one who stood by, not the one who did the harm but the one who didn't stop it.

Turn one palm upward. Into that hand, place what you love about them, or the good things that they gave to you. Be specific about what they actually did that meant something important. Not just "she was kind". Take a few breaths here to really feel into it.

Turn the other poem upward. Into that hand place the moment it still hurt, the things you have not been able to let go of or forgive. Again, be specific. Take a few more breaths here.

Now notice which hand calls your attention, and which one your attention wants to leave.

One position will be harder to hold than the other. Which one it is will tell you something, so don't decide in advance. Instead, allow your attention to show you.

Resist any urge to try to resolve the tension. Stay with both positions for a few more breaths. Now find the part of you that wants to reach or a verdict or the exit and ask it directly, “what are you afraid happens if I hold both?”

Write down what that part says. The answer is the piece you can contemplate for as long as it takes: days, weeks, or longer until you begin to feel the truth of holding both without resistance.

The goal is not to arrive at a conclusion. It's to lengthen the time you can hold two true and yet conflicting things without needing one of them to be wrong.

Paid subscribers get the companion practice for Holding the Paradox of the Bystander (and the archive of practice guides):

Stepping out of the System

We step out of these roles that we play through self-awareness, boundaries, accountability, agency and responsibility. Self-awareness brings you out of the role and into alignment with what IFS calls the Capital-S-Self and what Buddhism calls the Witnessing Self.

Self-awareness, noticing, and developing a witnessing self are foundational for healing these wounds.

Practice Noticing

(for paid subscribers)

Sit comfortably, and whatever way feels most natural. You can keep your eyes open or closed for this practice.

Begin to notice what's loudest in you right now. Is it a thought, a memory, a body sensation? It may not be the largest thing in your life, but whatever comes to mind naturally first and calls your attention.

Don't try to push away whatever shows up, even if it is very uncomfortable. Just stay with it and notice the quality, beyond the content. If it feels like a part of you, or one of the roles that we just named, is most present, ask it if it would be willing to sit back just a little bit.

This is the practice of unblending with a part through honest noticing. It's OK if it doesn't feel calm, because calm is not the goal. The goal is simply to be with whatever is. Notice where you are noticing from. Many people find it somewhere behind their sternum or in the area of their third eye. Or you may notice no location at all, which is also perfectly fine. Now begin to notice the way that the noticing practice allows you to drop into a quiet space beneath the noise. This is where your Witnessing Self lives. Stay here for just a moment and see if you can connect with the sensation so that you can come back to the witnessing self whenever you feel disconnected.

Curiosity is the core here, not peace or warmth or the absence of struggle. This is the calm, quiet center of your being.

Paid subscribers get the companion practice for Practicing Noticing:

From my witnessing heart to yours,

Coming in 2 weeks: The Power of the Witnessing Self

New here? I’m a scientist-turned-psychotherapist and I write about healing, trauma, and psychospiritual growth at the intersection.

Paid subscribers receive monthly practices to embody healing wisdom, access to a semi-private chat, and answers to your questions about how healing happens in ask-me-anything sessions.

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If you recognize your own spiral in this work and you’re wondering whether you need to do this alone — you don’t. I offer psychospiritual coaching for people doing deep healing work. Let’s Talk →

Welcome %%first_name%%, I’m Linnea and I write about healing at the intersection of science and spirituality, and embracing the Both-And.

I’m so glad you’re here.

There’s a moment in the therapy room that is both painful and beautiful, and it always wakes up a sense of reverence in me. A client releases an old pattern, and the grief of everything that pattern once held moves through them and out.

That is the moment the seed of transformation is planted.

This is clean pain, tears that wash away the ashes of a life too small, and open space for something more aligned to emerge. Just like composting old material to nourish new growth.

This kind of grief is medicine. It teaches us how to release what we've outgrown… and how much that release costs.

We’ve been taught to fear grief as something that happens to us when we lose a loved one. I want to talk about the grief that happens for us, as the price of transformation.

The Science of Grief

Underneath the story, grief is a nervous system event. Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory describes how our physiology organizes around cues of safety and danger, mostly beneath our awareness. When something ends, like a relationship, an identity, or a belief you'd built your life on, the nervous system reads it as its own organization collapsing.

Grief is what it feels like when the body begins to reorganize around an absence, but before it has time to build a new scaffolding.

Pat Ogden’s work in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy adds the understanding that reorganization doesn’t happen through thinking. It happens through metabolizing bodily held memories, the ones that live in sensation and movement below our conscious awareness; in bracing patterns, in the immune system, in chronic tension, and in patterned movement. Insight alone isn’t enough to move the needle. An old belief can survive years of therapy and journaling and still run the show.

You cannot out-think the nervous system. You have to feel your way through.

The Three Griefs of Transformation

In transformational coaching and depth psychotherapy, grief tends to show up in at least three distinct forms, and it helps to know which one we’re in. We typically only talk about the first one, and that is a mistake.

Grief for what happened — the actual wounding, the conditions that made a coping strategy necessary in the first place.

Grief for what didn’t happen — the relationships you didn’t let yourself have, the chances you never took, the version of your life the old belief quietly closed off. This one is harder to see. It’s grief for a life path you may never have considered possible.

Grief for the missing experience — the experiences we need that you didn't have. Being cherished by a parent. Unconditional love. A home that felt safe. This is called disenfranchised grief: a loss with no funeral, because nothing technically died. But the body knows the absence is real, even when everyone around you insists there's nothing to mourn.

Grief as Sacred Passage

Long before any of this had research behind it, cultures across the world treated grief as a sacred passage, a threshold that required ritual and time, and for others to bear witness. Communities wailed together out loud because sound moving through the body is a form of release. Elders understood that a person moving through grief was moving through a portal and that the community’s job was to hold the space and not rush the process.

We’ve largely lost this. What we’ve kept instead is a culture that hands you a few days of bereavement leave for the death of a person, and nothing at all for the death of a belief, or an identity, or an old organizing story. There’s a phrase I return to, sometimes attributed to writer Jamie Anderson: grief is just love with no place to go. Grief cannot be rushed for any loss, including the loss of the chance to live an aligned life. You cannot organize your entire nervous system around a belief for forty years and expect the grieving of it to resolve in a weekend.

Grief for Our World

Not all of this grief is individual. Increasingly, the people I sit with are grieving something larger. Climate collapse. The fraying of institutions where we once placed trust. An economy that no longer delivers what it promised (or even pretends to). A political landscape so polarized the culture is tearing itself apart. This grief is real. It deserves the same respect as any other kind of grief, not a diagnosis of anxiety to be medicated.

But mourning for something that has, in fact, been lost.

Joanna Macy spent her life making the case that grief is evidence of love. In The Work That Reconnects, Joanna holds our pain for the world as sacred, a direct measure of our interconnection with it. We can only grieve what we love. And grieving the unraveling of ecosystems, of institutions, of a future we counted on is proof we were never separate from any of it. Macy’s insight mirrors what I see in the therapy room. The pain isn’t the problem; avoiding it is. When we refuse to feel grief for the world, it curdles into numbness, denial, or busyness that pretends to be useful.

Pema Chödrön offers a companion teaching from the Buddhist tradition. In When Things Fall Apart, she calls groundlessness the condition of being alive, rather than a thing to fix. When we lean into it instead of bracing, we open to compassion. First for ourselves, and then for everyone else who’s just as frightened, just as unsure the ground will hold. Tonglen is one of the most potent practices I know, but it is also very intense. You intentionally breathe in suffering and breathe out peace and light, allowing yourself to be the vehicle of transformation.

Tonglen works by reversing our instinct to push away suffering. It asks you to breathe in pain and suffering, fully and without flinching, and breathe out relief, spaciousness, or light. You can do it for your own suffering, for the suffering of someone you love, and for suffering so vast it is beyond our ability to fully name it, like grief for the state of our world. Relief doesn’t come from fixing anything but from changing our relationship to suffering.

Rather than holding what you’ve taken in, this version leads you to let the pain drop down, out of your body and into the molten core of the earth, where it is metabolized. You become a conduit rather than the container.

Paid subscribers get my Tonglen Guided Meditation.

Tonglen works by reversing our instinct to push away suffering. It asks you to breathe in pain and suffering, fully and without flinching, and breathe out relief, spaciousness, or light. You can do it for your own suffering, for the suffering of someone you love, and for suffering so vast it is beyond our ability to fully name it, like grief for the state of our world. Relief doesn’t come from fixing anything but from changing our relationship to suffering.

Rather than holding what you’ve taken in, this version leads you to let the pain drop down, out of your body and into the molten core of the earth, where it is metabolized. You become a conduit rather than the container.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Listen to my Guided Tonglen Meditation here (18 min):

Seen this way, grief for collapsing systems stops being a private catastrophe and becomes a doorway into solidarity with every other person feeling the same thing.

This is where personal grief and collective grief move together to the same melancholic, but slowly transformative, tune. Grieving an old belief clears space for a nervous system to come into alignment. Grieving the world clears space for a fiercer kind of relational care and for whatever comes after. We practice this kind of relational presence in The Weaving.

Bypassing grief with avoidance or forced optimism does the same damage at a civilizational scale that it does in a single body. It keeps us organized around a center that can no longer hold.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

— William Butler Yeats

Honoring, Not Transcending or Bypassing

Sometimes our attempts to help can cause harm through invalidation and dismissal:

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“This was all necessary for your growth.”

“But look how far you’ve come.”

Oh how these make me cringe! Not because they are untrue, but because they are almost always said to make the witness more comfortable. They interrupt the flow of raw emotion that the grieving person actually needs.

This is where we can tip into bypassing.

Trying to make the leap to meaning before the loss has been fully felt doesn’t work. We cannot rush the process (for ourselves or for anyone else), no matter how much we’d like to.

Grief doesn’t need to be transcended to become sacred. It already is sacred, exactly as it is, in its rawest and most unfiltered form. The people I’ve watched change most fully weren’t the ones who got to the insight fastest. They were the ones who allowed the process to move through them at its own pace. They grieved the caregiver who wasn’t there, the child-self who became hypervigilant to survive, the 70-year-old realizing they’d never fully lived.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”

— Henry David Thoreau

The Only Way Out is Through

Underneath it all lives a paradox. Grief is painful AND it is generative. It is the initiation that costs you the old story and the medicine that lets you survive its absence. It is the teacher whose curriculum is feel it fully.

This both-and is not a spiritual nicety but the mechanism of healing. The generativity doesn’t arrive after the pain is gone — it arrives inside the pain.

If an old belief is softening in you right now and you are beginning to feel the grief, this may be a sign that you are being initiated out of a borrowed story. You don’t need a death to justify this grief. And you don’t need anyone’s permission to know it is real.

Let it be unglamorous. Let it loop, circle back, undo you a little more before it lets you go. The only way out is through, and through has never been a straight line. It’s a spiral, a sacred medicine path being allowed to do its work.

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Five Practices for Metabolizing Grief

You can use these practices individually or in order, follow what speaks to you. There are no deadlines or “shoulds”. The practices are meant to be repeated as many times as feels right, whether that is once or fifty times.

1. Orient your nervous system.

Before you go in toward the grief, check in with your nervous system and offer it a reminder that it’s safe enough to feel it. Look around the room and name five things you can see. Notice the temperature of the air on your skin. Feel the surface underneath you holding your weight. Notice what sounds you can hear, close by or in the distance. This step grounds you in present moment awareness, where you can remember that right here and right now, you are safe.

2. Titrate with intention.

You don’t have to feel everything all at once. Flooding your nervous system will have the opposite effect of what we are aiming for. Set a timer for three minutes and for those three minutes only, let yourself feel the grief as fully as you can. Notice the thoughts, the worries and the body sensations as fully as you are able. Feel the tightness, the heat behind the eyes, the heaviness. When the timer ends, deliberately shift your attention away from the grief. Get up and move around, drink some water, come back to the present moment and re-orient your nervous system to the now. This allows you to experience the grief and let it move through you in little bits so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. When you’re ready, come back for another three or five minutes later. Most people are surprised to find that grief given three minutes of awareness moves more than grief given three days of avoidance and distraction.

3. Build a container.

Sometimes you truly cannot afford to feel this right now, like when you’re driving, you’re at work, or you’re tending to a child. We build safe containers for moments such as these. Imagine a physical container, something with a top that can be closed: a box, a chest, a jar with a lid. Get very specific about the container, how big is it, what is it made of, is it heavy? what color is it, how does the top latch? Mentally place the grief inside it, and say mentally or out loud, I’m not abandoning you. I’ll be back in (1 hour, 2 days, whatever feels realistic). Then actually come back. The container practice only works when you make a promise to come back to it, and then you actually do.

4. Track the sensation, not the story.

The mind wants to tell a story, replaying what happened and what “should” have happened. But the story keeps us trapped in wishful thinking and in our heads. The body grieves in noticing sensation and allowing it to move through you. When you notice yourself stuck in a story, gently bring your awareness back to sensation. Find the specific location (throat, chest, gut, hands), name the quality of the sensation (tight, achy, sharp) and just stay with it for a few breaths until you notice a shift. The shift may be a change in location, intensity or quality. It doesn’t matter. If there is a shift, something has metabolized.

5. Tonglen

Tonglen works by reversing our instinct to push away suffering. It asks you to breathe in pain and suffering, fully and without flinching, and breathe out relief, spaciousness, or light. You can do it for your own suffering, for the suffering of someone you love, and for suffering so vast it is beyond our ability to fully name it, like grief for the state of our world. Relief doesn’t come from fixing anything but from changing our relationship to suffering. This is the most sophisticated practice of the five practices.

Listen to a Guided Tonglen Practice, 18 min

Reflection Questions

Give yourself some privacy and find space where you won’t be interrupted. Pick one question and write for five minutes without editing. Just put pen to paper and begin writing. There is no wrong or right, only the expression of what is real.

* What happened (or didn’t happen) that needs to be grieved?

* What version of my life changed as a result? What will I never experience because of it?

* Is there something I’m grieving that never existed in the first place, a kind of care, safety, or belonging I needed and didn’t get? What would life have looked like if I had?

* What does this grief want me to know?

* If I let a trusted person witness this grief, what would I want them to simply say back to me?

* What ritual, however small, could honor this loss? (Lighting a candle. Writing a letter you don’t send. Saying the loss out loud to another person.)

Integration

Metabolized grief leads to a sense of spaciousness, not emptiness. This closing practice is how you integrate the spaciousness into your daily awareness.

1. Notice the shift. Before you do anything else, scan your body the way you did when you started. Notice if body tension has shifted or if breath that moves slightly deeper or with less effort. Naming even a small shift out loud teaches your nervous system that this work changes something, which is exactly what it needs to trust the process.

2. Find what’s still here to be grateful for. Consider the things you are actually grateful for, no matter how small and let yourself actually feel it. Every single person can honestly name three things that they are grateful for today, right now. A person who was kind. A beautiful scene in nature. Having a place to lay your head at night. Name three things right now, or better yet write them down.

3. Let yourself feel joy for what’s being reclaimed. Every grief that’s actually metabolized returns something to us. Energy that was tied up in body tension, a lighter version of you, a capacity for aliveness you’d forgotten. Just notice, for even three seconds, the smallest flicker of relief, lightness, or anticipation. Notice how something is also being given back.

Close by placing one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Say, silently or aloud, It’s going to be OK. I’m here with you. Take three slow breaths and let that be enough.

Paid subscribers get the companion practice guide (+ everything else):

Five Practices for Metabolizing Grief

From my heart to yours

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I’m a scientist-turned-psychotherapist, psychedelic guide, energy healer, and writer. This is not a just another wellness newsletter. It’s an ongoing inquiry into what healing actually requires… written from someone speaking from both clinical and personal experience.

“Linnea Butler is a rare guide for the soul — part scientist, part mystic, and all heart. A trauma-informed psychotherapist and chronic illness warrior, she bridges science and spirituality with insight, irreverence, and deep care.” — Dr. Bronce Rice, The Wellbeing Equation

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© Linnea Butler 2026

“The obstacle is the path” is one of those Zen sayings we nod at and move past. Just like the way we respond “fine” when someone asks how we are. It’s reflexive.

But what happens when we really contemplate what this saying means, and then begin to live it?

Our world expands.

The Comfort Trap

We hate discomfort, and of course we do! Our nervous systems are built to move us away from pain and toward safety. But somewhere along the way, avoiding discomfort became all consuming: binging Netflix, endless scrolling, shopping for things we don’t need, a drink to take the edge off. In small doses, this is just being human. In large enough doses, they become a strategy to keep the discomfort out at all costs, but that has a cost of it’s own.

Comfort-seeking has become a crisis of its own making.

There's a clinical name for this. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls it experiential avoidance, a life organized around dodging uncomfortable internal states. Decades of research on it point to the same thing this essay is built on: avoidance doesn't just fail to solve the discomfort. It's the mechanism that makes a life smaller.

Because as we run from discomfort, our world shrinks.

We stop trying the new thing because the risk of failing is too scary. We hide our dreams deep inside in a place we fear to look because our day-to-day reality doesn’t make it easy. We build smaller and smaller boxes to live in, and we call it self-care or realism or just being tired. That’s all true… to a point. But a life organized around avoiding discomfort doesn’t actually get more comfortable.

It gets more brittle and we become less able to withstand anything at all.

The Obstacle that Changed My Life… For the Better

Healing moves us in the opposite direction. In order to heal we must face the pain.

When we lean into discomfort instead of running away, and when we treat the obstacle as a teacher, something unexpected happens. The box expands. The uncomfortable thing doesn’t disappear, but we grow larger around it because have proven to ourselves that we can be in it and survive. It isn’t the absence of hard things that makes life worthwhile. It’s facing them and growing until we feel confident that we can handle those hard things.

This is the same descent Bill Plotkin writes about, advocating down and in rather than up and out and allowing dissolution before whatever wants to be born next. The box we live in expands when we move through the underworld and come back out with a gift we didn't have before.

I don’t think we ever really choose this path. We’re called to it, usually by the thing we’d most like to avoid. Shadow work is exactly this kind of calling, not a choice so much as a road into Mordor where the only way out is through.

In 2020, I got sick. My body forced me to slow down in a way I had never once chosen for myself.

For decades, I had pushed through. I dissociated from discomfort so reliably I didn’t know I was doing it. I called it my superpower. So slowing down was not something I would ever choose, so my body did it for me. This happened once before when I was in high school and pushed so hard that I put myself in the hospital with pneumonia. But that is a story for another time. In 2020 my body got loud enough that I had no choice but to listen.

It didn’t feel like a teacher at the time. It felt like betrayal.

What I understand now and didn't appreciate then, is that collapse is what a nervous system does as a last resort. When fight and flight haven't worked and there's no more room to push, the body drops into dorsal vagal shutdown. Energy recedes and everything slows as the system conserves itself. It's the oldest, most conservative survival strategy we have.

My therapist told me, over and over, to slow down. To let myself heal instead of muscling through it. My astrologer named the season I was in as a period of “convalescence,” a word I resisted then (and still resist now, if I’m honest). I did not want to convalesce. I wanted to get back to being productive. But I learned, mostly against my will, that every time I pushed my body past what it could actually do (which admittedly wasn’t much and that infuriated me) I paid for it later. The bill always came due.

The Gifts That Were Waiting

In slowing down, I started connecting to gifts our culture doesn’t reward.

Namely, anything that isn’t productivity-oriented and goal-focused.

I started to embrace the Both-And that I spent years remembering. I knew this as a child but I had pushed it away in order to please the powers-that-be. So now I write about how the scientist and the mystic aren't opposites competing, they're awareness tuned to different frequencies. I didn't find my gifts inside of or despite my training. I found them because I had slowed down to allow them to emerge as I held the tension of opposites.

My ability to sense what’s beyond the ordinary goes back to childhood, long before the illness. I felt it at fourteen, the morning my father died miles away, and I’ve spent much of my life since learning what to do with a gift I didn’t ask for. My healer gift works the same way. I’ve written about discovering, mid-psychedelic-journey, that I conduct other people’s pain the way a crystal grid conducts energy, and that having the capacity was not the same as having the wisdom to use it well.

Neither of these gifts was new. They had been there the whole time, just unused long enough to atrophy from disuse, the way a muscle does when you stop working it. Or worse, to fire on their own the way the crystal grid did before I learned to ground it.

The illness hadn’t taken something from me. It showed me what I’d ignored and forgotten and gave me a reason to go find it.

The Cost of Misaligned Living

The reason my body had to yell at me is that I was living a misaligned life. On paper, my life was amazing. I had a beautiful home in the mountains of California, owned and ran a successful business and had a loving husband. But I was unhappy and my nervous system was beyond overwhelmed.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.”

— Thoreau

I believe that desperation happens when we live a misaligned life. That misalignment creeps up on us slowly as we find new and more insidious ways to avoid discomfort instead of learning from it. Just like the story of the frog in boiling water.

This isn’t only an individual problem, it is a collective one. Western culture learned to exile discomfort the same way it taught us to exile the parts of ourselves that weren't productive. Quiet desperation isn't a personal failing at mass scale, but what an entire culture looks like when it's organized around comfort instead of alignment. Healing the individual and healing the collective are the same process, just at different scales.

We don’t find our way back into alignment passively. We find it by doing some deep work to understand our values and which ones we haven’t been nurturing. When we make daily decisions that prioritize our values (which often comes at the cost of comfort) instead of choosing comfort, we slowly lean back into the gifts we let go dormant.

So I’ll ask you the questions I return to myself, again and again:

What obstacles have shown up in your life that might actually be teachers?

What are they trying to tell you?

What might you be missing by refusing to listen?

If this essay has resonated and you’re ready to seek out the gifts hidden within obstacles, you may enjoy the Practice Guide that accompanies this essay.

From my heart to yours,

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Coming in 2 weeks: Grief as Transformation

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© Linnea Butler 2026

Something is shifting. You can feel it if you’re paying attention.

Women are breaking the silence and speaking up in ways they haven’t before. Calling for accountability from a culture that has normalized oppression of, and brutality against feminine bodies, wisdom and strength.

Thousands of us read the article “What Happens When the World is Motherless” that names the sacred rage that many of us feel but are afraid to speak.

The article catalyzed conversations in several communities I’m part of. Women began sharing their stories of violation, but also stories of the more subtle ways patriarchy harms. The dismissals. The silencing. The ways we’ve learned to make ourselves smaller to stay safe.

The preference for the bear over the man.

I thought of the line often attributed to Edmund Burke, “All that is needed for evil to prosper is for good [people] to do nothing.”

And I found myself writing something I don’t often share publicly:

“Each of us knows women who have been raped. Each of us knows men who have done the raping. If you think you don’t, I promise you, you’re wrong.

One of my specialties as a therapist is sexual violence and 50% of all women have experienced this.

Read that again.

If anything that number is low because it doesn’t count unreported instances.

I am one of the 50%. I no longer harbor anger, but I do hold deep grief for the continued silence of our culture. A culture where a rape academy can exist without meaningful consequence.”

Another woman responded with words of her own:

“The 50% you speak of is only those who have reported or expressed their abuse. Most women never speak up; they hold it in their cellular tissue, let it fester over the course of their lifetimes, and then pass it down through their DNA.”

The silence doesn’t just harm us in the present.

It becomes inheritance.

What I Didn’t Expect

What surprised me wasn’t the sharing. I’m a therapist who specializes in this work and I’ve held space for hundreds of these stories.

What surprised me was the intensity of my own response.

The passion that rose up in me and the recognition of how deeply this wound lives in my body, even after years of healing work.

I have a tendency to name what everyone knows is present but no one wants to look at. It doesn’t make me popular, and this time was no different. But I see it as door-opening work and that is sacred.

Because we cannot heal what we do not acknowledge.

And the harm of patriarchy, the violence it enables, the silence that perpetuates it needs to be acknowledged.

The Pattern of Silence

When women (and also men) speak about sexual violence and systemic harm, they are often met with silence or dismissal.

Some of that silence is shock. Some is not knowing what to say. Some is the discomfort of recognizing complicity, even passive complicity, in systems we benefit from or fail to challenge.

And some of it… the hardest part… is defensiveness.

A certain amount of defensiveness is to be expected when an aspect of one’s identity is challenged. It's a predictable nervous system response to identity threat, and the work is precisely to stay present with that physiological state without acting on it. Though every form of systemic injustice has its own shape, this mirrors the dynamics we see in anti-racism work, where white people must first grapple with their own privilege before they can proceed to deeper work.

The initial response is often some version of: “But I’m not like that. I’m one of the good ones. Don’t lump me in with those people.”

It’s what happens next, after the defensiveness, that really matters.

What Patriarchy Actually Means

Before we go further, let’s be clear about something essential:

Patriarchy does not equate with men.

bell hooks wrote that “Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”

Life-threatening to men as well as to women.

Patriarchy is a system of control and domination that has harmed all of us for thousands of years. It’s a structure that limits what’s possible for everyone inside it.

Men are taught to disconnect from their emotions, to perform strength rather than feel it, to suppress tenderness and vulnerability. The terror of humiliation, the pressure, the addiction, and the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their lives are some of the costs.

And that means the solution isn’t about demonizing men or creating new hierarchies with different people at the top. We need to really examine, and then dismantle the entire structure.

Recognizing Patriarchal Wounds and Reclaiming Wholeness is the practice guide for taking this work into your own body.

What Actually Helps

I’ve been thinking a lot about what moves conversations forward when this topic arises. What allows people to stay present with discomfort rather than shut down the conversation, dismiss women’s voices or move to defend?

Acknowledging systemic benefit without personalizing it as individual guilt. There’s a difference between recognizing “I benefit from structures that harm others” and “I am a bad person.” The first invites accountability. The second invites shutdown.

Naming discomfort and staying present anyway. Rather than collapsing into self-flagellation or demanding reassurance, there’s something powerful about simply saying: “This is uncomfortable. I’m feeling defensive. And I’m choosing to stay here anyway.”

Making it about accountability, not performance. The goal isn’t to prove you’re “one of the good ones.” The goal is to see the system clearly and take responsibility for the ways you participate in it, actively or passively.

Understanding that this work is developmental. Just as with anti-racism work, dismantling internalized patriarchal conditioning is a process, not a single conversation. There will be missteps. There will be learning edges. The work is to keep returning to it with awareness and humility.

Making space for others’ pain without centering your own discomfort. When someone shares a story of violation or harm, the response isn’t “But I would never...” or “Help me feel better about this.” The response is: “I’m listening. Thank you for trusting me with this.”

One man, after reading the “Motherless” article, wrote something that captures this quality of response:

“If you haven’t read this you must. If you have read it, you need to do it again until you feel it. I caught myself. It landed like a bomb with me and I was then in a ‘what can I say about this’ mode...

I then remembered all the times I ‘explained this away’ in the past… The masculine has trouble getting into this space. Stop. Breathe. Recognize the pain implicit here. You don’t need to solve anything…

I would encourage men to PULL ON THIS THREAD. There is more there than we can begin to appreciate.”

Notice what he’s doing: He’s naming his own defensiveness. He’s owning past dismissals. He’s recognizing the masculine tendency to problem-solve rather than witness. And crucially, he’s calling other men to do the work, not asking women to make it easier.

This is what it looks like to embody divine masculine energy.

When I talk about dismantling patriarchy, I’m not talking about erasing masculine energy. I’m talking about calling forth its sacred expression.

This energy doesn’t get defensive when challenged. It listens, witnesses, and takes responsibility.

It doesn’t say “Not all men.” It says “What can I do differently?”

It doesn’t demand comfort. It offers presence.

It doesn’t center itself. It makes space.

What We’re All Called to Do

This collective awakening and reckoning with patriarchy’s harms is calling all of us forward.

Women are being called to speak what has been silenced. To trust the wisdom of our bodies. To name what we know, even (or especially) when that makes others uncomfortable.

Men are being called to listen without defending. To examine their conditioning. To feel the grief of what patriarchy has cost them: their emotional wholeness, their capacity for authentic connection, their access to the full range of human experience.

All of us are being called to see the system clearly, recognize the ways we’ve been shaped by it and to choose something different.

I want to say one more thing, and it's the part that's hardest for me to say:

The patriarchy doesn’t just live “out there” in systems and structures and other people’s behaviors.

It lives in me too.

In my lineage and in the women who raised me. In the choices I made in my early careers, learning to move through male-dominated spaces, and internalizing patriarchal values. (I’ll go deeper into this in the next essay)

Patriarchal conditioning is insidious, and largely invisible to us. Like a fish trying to understand the nature of water.

For now, I’ll say this:

If you’re a woman reading this and feeling the weight of what hasn’t been named, you’re not alone.

And if you’re a man reading this and feeling the discomfort of complicity or the grief of recognizing harm, that discomfort is the doorway. Don’t turn away from it. There’s medicine on the other side.

We need the archetypal energy of both the divine feminine and the divine masculine for this healing.

The world we’re all longing for requires it.

From my heart to yours,

If this essay moved you, the work continues in the practice guide. Recognizing Patriarchal Wounds and Reclaiming Wholeness.

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I'm a licensed psychotherapist and psychospiritual coach. If you've been doing this work for years and something essential still isn't shifting, that gap is exactly where I work. Work with me →

Coming in June:

June 11th - The Patriarchy Lives in Me Too

June 11th - Guide to Recognizing Patriarchal Wounds and Reclaiming Wholeness

June 25th - Beyond EMDR Guide: A Roadmap for Healing Complex Childhood Trauma

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© Linnea Butler 2026

The title is a famous quote by Ram Dass that spoke to me deeply the first time I heard it, resonating in a way that has taken me years to fully appreciate.

These words would surface during difficult moments, land softly in quiet ones, echo through my work with clients. But I couldn’t have told you exactly why they mattered so much.

I just knew they did.

You may be wondering: what does Home have to do with healing?

Absolutely EVERYTHING.

The Geography of Longing

As an only child living in a rural area, I was often lonely. I craved a big family, with brothers and sisters, cousins and aunties. One that could hold me in the way I needed as a sensitive, porous-souled child, where I wouldn’t have to carry so much alone.

Perhaps part of my craving for Home, for a sense of community and belonging, was inherited from my mother. Intergenerational patterns pass through both behaviors and genetics. And I believe they also pass transpersonally. My mother moved 32 times through her childhood and young adulthood… always searching, never quite landing, perpetually hoping that the next place would be The One.

I may have absorbed some of her fears. Or maybe I absorbed the restless ache of a nervous system that believed home was always just out of reach.

Home is a feeling more than it is a place. And the feeling of Home has very little to do with geography.

It has everything to do with the nervous system, co-regulation and interpersonal neurobiology.

The nervous system must feel safe in order to soften. I don’t mean safe as in a cognitive understanding. I mean something much deeper and more subtle. The kind of safety where you can let down the masks, where you can be challenged and feel loved all at the same time.

When we feel at home within our bones and nervous system, healing happens naturally because the conditions are right to allow it. Sort of like when you remove a splinter and the wound heals on its own.

The Moment Something Shifted

For years, I searched for that felt sense of Home in all the wrong places.

In achievement: if I just accomplished enough, proved enough, became enough.

In relationships: if I just found the right person who could hold me.

In understanding: if I just read enough books, completed enough training, mastered enough frameworks.

I understood nervous system regulation intellectually. I could teach it, explain polyvagal theory, map attachment patterns. But understanding and experiencing are profoundly different things.

I belong to an online community called The Weaving and our council meets weekly. [I talk about this community in an essay from a few weeks ago: We Cannot Hold This Alone.] One of the council members gently challenged my lifelong pattern of rushing, always focused on outcomes and goals, unable to rest in the unfolding.

My chest tightened and a familiar voice in my head said “but I need to move quickly, there’s so much to do.” My breath caught. The part of me that equates productivity with worth wanted to defend, to explain, to fix it right there in the moment.

And also, simultaneously, I felt his care. I could sense his invitation to slow down not as criticism, but as gift. And the rest of council held us both without rushing to resolve the tension.

I let that moment sit in my body rather than try to solve it with my mind. And slowly, something softened. The part that always needs to rush loosened its grip, just a little.

The whole time I sat with this, I felt loved. Held. Safe enough to be seen in my pattern without shame.

In that moment, I understood what Ram Dass meant just a little bit more.

What the Nervous System Actually Needs

What the nervous system needs is not unconditional acceptance of our patterns, but unconditional acceptance of our being while we’re challenged to grow.

This is what Dan Siegel calls interpersonal neurobiology: the way our nervous systems literally regulate each other, the way we become who we are through relationship, not despite it. But the research doesn’t capture what it feels like when your nervous system finally whispers: Here. These people. This is home.

Co-regulation can be felt in the body as:

💜 Your breath deepening when someone names a truth you’ve been afraid to speak.

💜 Your shoulders dropping when you realize you don’t have to perform.

💜 The softening in your chest when you’re challenged with love rather than judgment.

💜 The way your body knows, before your mind does, that you’re safe enough to be both strong and broken.

This is what safe community actually creates. Not the Instagram version of healing where everyone just validates everything and no one is ever uncomfortable. Not the spiritual bypassing of “good vibes only”.

Real safety. Nervous system safety. The kind that allows transformation to unfold.

Kind is Not Always Nice

The first impression of a safe community might be one where everyone is nice to each other.

I disagree.

Nice is not the goal. Kindness is. And kind is not always nice.

Sometimes kind is gentle challenging. Sometimes it’s the not-so-gentle reality check that comes from a place of good intent and is meant to help us move away from that which is not aligned and toward that which is.

Challenging one another leads to growth, and that is kind.

Nice would have let me keep rushing, kept validating my productivity, said “you’re perfect just as you are” while watching me exhaust myself. Nice would have been easy in the moment, and useless for creating change and fostering healing.

Kind saw the pattern and named it. Kind trusted that I could handle the discomfort. Kind held me while I sat with the frustration and waited for the softening.

In nice spaces, your body stays armored even while people smile. You edit yourself before speaking. Your breath stays shallow. You perform wellness rather than experience it.

And it is exhausting!

In kind spaces, your nervous system softens even when the content is challenging. You can bring your “no” and have it strengthen the collective “yes.” You’re encouraged to be mid-process, not performing completion.

Safe community holds you accountable AND holds you with compassion. Both. Always both.

Breaking the Inherited pattern

I think about my mother and her 32 moves, her endless searching. What was she really looking for?

Not a better city or prettier house or different neighbors. She was searching for the feeling that every sensitive person is searching for: a place where her nervous system could finally exhale. Where she could be perfectly imperfect. Where the restlessness could ease because she’d finally arrived… not at a destination, but at a feeling.

I inherited that ache, that belief that home was always just beyond reach.

But in that council moment when I was challenged about my rushing while simultaneously also feeling completely loved, something shifted. Not just in my pattern, but also in the inherited story. The belief that belonging was always elsewhere, that I had to keep moving, achieving, proving to earn it.

My nervous system has learned something my mother’s never did:

Home isn’t a place you find. It’s a feeling you create together.

Home is where we are safe enough to be challenged. Safe to grow. Safe to both hold and to be held.

How Your Body Recognizes Home

Home isn’t a destination. It’s not a place we arrive and stay forever, healed and complete.

It’s the practice of walking together: of holding and being held, of challenging and being challenged, of softening into the truth that we were never meant to find our way alone.

Your body will tell you, if you listen.

Home feels like:

* Words coming without rehearsal, without editing

* Eye contact that doesn’t require armoring

* Breath that deepens on its own

* The ability to fall apart and be strong, often in the same conversation

* Being seen in your patterns without shame

* Challenge that arrives wrapped in care

* Softening you didn’t consciously choose

Home doesn’t feel like:

* Performing completion when you’re mid-process

* Nice validation that avoids difficult truths

* Comfortable stagnation disguised as acceptance

* Having to choose between being honest and being loved

Trust the intelligence below the words.

Your nervous system is more intelligent than your mind. It knows the difference between performance and presence, between nice and kind, between loneliness and belonging.

Trust that knowing.

Where do you feel “home” in your body right now, reading this?

What does your nervous system need in order to soften?

What would it mean to stop searching for home in geography and start recognizing it in the felt experience of safety?

I promise you this: your body knows the feeling of safety.

It’s more intelligent than any map.

And it will walk you home.

From my heart to yours,

Let’s walk each other home

I’m a licensed psychotherapist and psychospiritual coach specializing in trauma and spiritual development. If you’re ready to go deeper, I offer psychospiritual coaching and energy healing sessions worldwide. Learn more →

Thank you for being here.

© Linnea Butler 2026

Years ago, I sat in a circle at a psychedelic psychotherapy training retreat. The kind of space where medicines move through bodies and truth lands differently. One of the leaders, someone who’d worked with Indigenous communities across continents, said something that stopped my in my mental tracks:

“We must hold the shadow in community. There is too much to hold alone.”

The way those words landed in my nervous system wasn’t just intellectual resonance. It was relief. A permission I hadn’t realized I needed.

I looked around the circle and wondered how many others felt that same relief? How many of us had been white-knuckling our way through individual healing, spiritual practice, shadow work… secretly terrified we’re not strong enough, not evolved enough, not enough to hold what’s moving through us?

That moment became a thread I couldn’t stop pulling. If we can’t hold this alone, what does that mean for how we practice healing? How we conceive of consciousness? How we build our lives? As a psychotherapist, I wondered if our model of individual healing was all wrong for our current times.

The Myth of Rugged Individualism Meets Its Edge

We’ve been marinating in a Western cultural myth that healing happens in isolation. Heal yourself, fix yourself, transcend your limits alone. The hero’s journey was always a solo quest, without the community that holds the space and welcomes you back.

My own training reflected this perfectly. Molecular biology taught me to isolate variables in controlled environments. Therapy training centered the 50-minute individual hour. Even spiritual practice was framed as solitary: your meditation cushion, your journal, your inner work.

But there’s an exhaustion that comes from carrying your own shadow plus your clients’ shadow plus the world’s shadow.

And there is a deeper truth here…

You don’t have to do this alone. You were never supposed to.

“The Next Buddha Will Be a Sangha”

Thich Nhat Hanh taught this beautiful wisdom. Now I understand it as evolutionary necessity. Maybe the loss of singular spiritual leaders is opening space for something entirely new → co-created healing that emerges from the collective rather than flowing down from above.

Philosopher John Vervaeke refers to “catalytic communities”, groups bound not by hierarchy or transaction, but by sacred purpose larger than any individual. These communities are emerging now because they must.

The amount of shadow — personal, collective, planetary — has exceeded individual nervous system capacity. The meaning crisis demands collective sense-making. The collapse of institutions means we can’t wait for top-down solutions.

The initiation we’re in requires witnesses, not solo journeying.

Our bodies know this. The chest tightness when you scroll the news. The exhaustion sleep doesn’t fix.

Your nervous system is telling the truth.

From Isolated Nodes to Numinous Networks

There’s a vision emerging of what some are calling the World Wise Web or Numinous Networks. Not fixing broken institutions, but weaving new ones. Networks of people committed to collective wisdom rather than rugged individualism.

Distributed cognition research shows that intelligence doesn’t live only in individual brains but in the space between, much like mycelial networks.

When people gather with genuine shared purpose, something new emerges, a harmonic above the melody. What neuroscience recognizes as collective nervous system regulation. What quantum physics hints at with entanglement. I experienced this in the training retreat when medicine I knew well transported me to completely new territories, not because of the molecule but because of the container.

Communities that hold the sacred while doing shadow work offer collective practice that transforms what individual practice cannot.

But not all gathering is transformative.

True catalytic communities share specific qualities:

* Shared sacred purpose beyond individual benefit. You’re called to something larger than yourself, and that calling weaves you to others.

* Horizontal power where authority circulates and service rotates. Power moves like weather, never accumulating in one person or position.

* Shadow as foundation. We turn toward what’s uncomfortable, what’s tender, trusting that what we face with compassion becomes medicine.

* Both-and consciousness. Science AND spirit. Individual AND collective. Structure AND emergence. We refuse the false choices.

* Embodied practice, not just concepts. We value what moves through our bodies, our relationships, our lived experience.

* Witnessing without fixing. Seeing each other’s edges, holding space for dissolution, allowing what wants to emerge.

Your body knows the difference. In true catalytic community, your nervous system relaxes even when the content is challenging. You can bring your “no” and have it strengthen the collective “yes.” You’re allowed… no, encouraged… to be mid-process, not performing completion.

When you imagine that kind of space, what happens in your chest? Can you feel the anticipation of relief?

The Paradigm Shift

What shifts when we move from rugged individualism to collective intelligence?

Everything.

Individual work is still essential and I’m not abandoning my meditation cushion or my therapy practice. But this shift recognizes that individual work happens within and through relationship. We co-regulate and our mirror neurons ensure we share experience at a neurological level.

The scientist in me understands this as complexity and systems theory. The mystic in me recognizes what Indigenous cultures teach, that separateness was always illusion.

Interdependence is lived necessity.

Initiation requires witnesses. You cannot birth yourself alone. The weaving metaphor makes this clear: individual threads are beautiful, but the cloth that keeps us warm requires them woven together.

Where in your body do you feel the exhaustion of holding too much, alone?

What if your tiredness is an accurate assessment of an impossible load?

Practically, you begin to see that your healing doesn’t end with individual wholeness but asks to be woven with others. Your shadow work deepens exponentially when held collectively. Your gifts in exile need community to remember themselves.

And that exhaustion you’ve been pathologizing might be an accurate signal that you’re trying to do collectively necessary work in individual form.

What’s Calling

Who are the people who feel safe enough that you could be dissolved with and transformed alongside?

What if the next stage of your evolution isn’t something you do but something you become with others?

What would it cost you to be truly seen in your unfinished-ness? What would it cost you not to be?

That teaching from years ago — we must hold the shadow in community — hasn’t left me alone. It started as a persistent whisper and has grown to a calling to create community and exploring new (or more accurately remembering ancient) modes of healing.

I am in the process of doing just that.

This community, called The Weaving to honor that we each carry unique threads that are needed to create a beautiful tapestry of wholeness, is not mine alone. I recognize that I don’t have all the answers… and I don’t want to. I have found a beautiful friendship that has blossomed into a partnership in creation. Together with a few hand picked advisors, we are co-creating something new to weave the fabric that will hold us all through the coming times.

This recognition started changing how my dear friend and I moved through our own dissolution. Instead of trying to hold the work of transformation and liminality alone, we started asking: What if our unfinished-ness is exactly what qualifies us to weave with others? What if being mid-process is the invitation?

We cannot do this alone. And we were never meant to.

As The Weaving unfolds it’s colors, we will share more in the coming months about how you can join us.

For now, the question that won’t leave me is:

What becomes possible when we pause to breathe deeply, stop holding the world’s shadow alone, stop trying to survive the great transition alone, and instead start weaving through it together?

What becomes possible when the next Buddha is, in fact, a Sangha?

I think we’re about to find out.

From my communal heart to yours,

Join us in exploring collective intelligence

I work with a small number of people 1:1 — those who’ve done enough work to know that the right framework isn’t the same as the right support. Learn more →

© Linnea Butler 2026

At the beginning of every year, I choose a word to contemplate. This year, I struggled… until I realized my word had already found me through persistent whispers in the back of my mind.

Enough.

There is so much held within that little word. So much overlooked and skimmed.

It’s a word that works two ways, isn’t it?

→ A declaration of sufficiency: I am enough. This is enough.

→ And a refusal: Enough of this. No more.

Both feel true and both feel necessary. Both quietly radical in a culture that profits from perpetual dissatisfaction.

The Wetiko Psychosis

Late-stage capitalism requires us to never feel satisfied, never feel complete, never feel like we’ve arrived. Because the moment we say “this is enough,” we stop consuming, stop producing, and stop grinding ourselves into dust in service of someone else’s profit margin.

The system depends on scarcity, whether real or manufactured. On convincing us that hoarding is the only path to security and “he who dies with the most toys wins”. It needs us afraid, and grasping… always reaching while never quite arriving at enough.

Neuroscience has a name for this trap: hedonic adaptation. Our brains quickly adapt to whatever we acquire, returning to baseline happiness levels no matter what we gain. The promotion, the bigger house, or the fancy car all deliver a temporary spike of satisfaction (and dopamine) before fading to neutral. So we chase the next thing, and the next, convinced that this time it will finally be enough.

But it never is.

Paul Levy, in his book Dispelling Wetiko, describes this phenomenon through an Indigenous lens. Wetiko (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan) is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit, a mind-virus that embodies insatiable greed, excess, and selfish consumption. It’s a collective psychosis, a “sickness of the spirit” that can possess individuals and entire cultures.

Levy writes that wetiko “covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us.” It’s a psychospiritual disease that drives endless consumption, exploitation, and the inability to ever feel satisfied. The wetiko-infected person consumes other people’s labor, their resources, their very being and yet remains perpetually hungry.

This is the illness at the heart of extractive capitalism.

What if capitalism creates scarcity where natural abundance exists precisely because wetiko needs us in a perpetual state of lack?

Indigenous wisdom across cultures teaches the antidote: Take only what you need. Leave the rest as prayer.

Levy suggests that recognizing wetiko and truly seeing it clearly is the first step to dispelling it. Once we see the mind-virus for what it is, it begins to lose its power over us.

Buddhist Economics and the Middle Way

In 1973, economist E.F. Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. In it, he introduced the concept of Buddhist economics, a system that would prioritize human well-being and ecological sustainability over endless growth.

Schumacher wrote: “The keynote of Buddhist economics is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfying results.”

What is the optimal amount of consumption? Not the maximum, but the optimal that leads to genuine well-being without exploitation of people or our planet.

This is the Middle Way applied to material life: neither ascetic deprivation nor endless accumulation, but enough.

The Buddhist practice of contentment (santutthi) is not passive acceptance or settling for less. It’s an active cultivation of satisfaction with what actually meets our needs. It’s training the mind to recognize sufficiency rather than being perpetually hijacked by the next craving.

When we practice contentment, we’re literally rewiring our brains. We’re strengthening neural pathways that support satisfaction and resilience, while weakening the circuits that keep us on the hedonic treadmill.

We’re choosing to step off the wheel.

The Gift Economy

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about an alternative to the wetiko economy, the gift economy. She shares the story of a hunter in the Brazilian rainforest who, when asked how he would store his excess meat, looked puzzled.

“Store my meat?” he said. “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

In gift economies wealth is understood as having enough to share. Security comes not from hoarding but from nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own freezer or in the belly of your brother. Both keep hunger at bay, but with very different consequences for the people and for the land.

When the serviceberry produces abundant fruit, it doesn’t hoard the surplus. It feeds the birds who will carry its seeds. Similarly, when we take only what we need we participate in the regenerative cycles that sustain all life.

The gift economy is inherently immune to wetiko, because wetiko cannot survive in a climate of sufficiency and reciprocity. It requires scarcity to maintain its grip.

When Enough Means Freedom

Like many, the roots of “not enough” run deep in me. My father died at forty-six, believing he had not fully lived. His last words to me were about time and not having enough of it. I was only fourteen, and I took his message into my body as implicit knowledge, living below the surface of consciousness where it would quietly shape my life.

My mother carried scarcity from times of real deprivation and genuine hunger. She wanted to protect me out of love, but instead passed her fear.

Not enough time. Not good enough. Not enough security.

I see this pattern everywhere. So many of my clients come to me with a limiting belief that is some version of “not enough.” Not successful enough, not evolved enough, not healed enough: all variations of a single refrain.

What I’m learning is that the deepest act of rebellion available to us is simply saying: Enough. I have enough. I am enough.

So I’m choosing differently.

→ I’m not searching for wealth. I want enough financial security to meet my needs and share with others.

→ I don’t want the big home. I want a home that is just big enough to hold what matters.

→ I don’t want the fancy car. I have access to wonderful public transportation and that is enough.

What I want is simply enough. To have enough and not more. To be enough and let old expectations compost into nourishment for something new.

This is not deprivation. This is not playing small.

This is saying Enough! to the wetiko-infected systems that demand endless more.

And it’s saying You are enough to the parts of me still carrying inherited terror.

Both refusal and acceptance. Both revolution and rest.

What Becomes Possible

When I say “enough,” my body responds.

Sometimes with relief in the form of a softening, a settling, a coming home. Sometimes it’s the terror of old voices rising up to warn me and keep me grinding because that was the only safety they knew.

I’m learning to thank those parts and gently set down the fear they’re carrying. I’ve got this now. You can rest.

Choosing enough in a culture of manufactured scarcity is a revolutionary act…

It’s a refusal to participate in the wetiko economy.

It’s stepping off the hedonic treadmill.

It’s practicing the Middle Way in a culture of extremes.

It’s also a practice of trust. Trust that the Earth is abundant when we stop hoarding. That security comes from relationship, not accumulation. That we can dispel wetiko by refusing to feed it.

So I ask: What becomes possible when you stop chasing “more”?

What would change if you said Enough! to extraction and You are enough to yourself in the same breath?

What systems profit from your grinding while promising you’ll finally arrive if you just optimize a little better, achieve a little more?

The answers are simpler than our minds want them to be. Quieter. More grounded.

This work is enough.

This home is enough.

This life is enough.

I am enough.

When the old voices rise, ask is this wisdom, or is this wetiko speaking?

Then let it compost into something that can nourish new growth. All that grinding, all that terror, all those decades of “not enough” are waste that feeds something new.

Choosing enough is waking up. It’s seeing wetiko clearly, and in that seeing beginning to dispel it.

This is an essential piece that is needed in our world right now.

Wetiko thrives on our unconsciousness.

But we can wake up.

And we can choose enough.

From my heart to yours,

Join us in Holding Hope for Enoughness

Free, paid, liking, or lurking — I appreciate you. 🙏

Thank you for being here.

© Linnea Butler 2026