A short reflection on how each person has a habitual favorite negative emotion, whether grief, worry, aloneness, or annoyance, and a suggestion that naming one’s default misery and cultivating connection to self can make it dissipate.
An essay distinguishing growth from suffering, arguing that real transformation comes from freely chosen challenges that intimidate and require facing a fear or building a skill, rather than from pain that is imposed without consent.
A contemplative essay on the balance between oneness and aloneness, framing separateness as a necessary phase of the developmental journey that prepares the inner work leading to later stages of connection and unity.
Practical advice on achieving large or seemingly impossible goals by preempting them with tiny daily actions, focusing on the journey rather than the destination, and prioritizing consistent action over endless planning.
A real-time journal entry written while the author’s aunt was dying in hospice and her son underwent brain surgery, exploring grief, separateness, transcendence, and the spiritual idea of dissolving the self to rejoin oneness.
An essay on the neuroscience of reading people, drawing on research that a tuned-in listener or reader mirrors the brain patterns of a speaker or writer, and concluding that voice and text transmit a person’s state of mind.
An essay arguing that people can only love others to the degree they love themselves, explaining why loved ones’ actions may fall short of their claims, and advising readers to assess others’ self-love and examine their own.
A reflection on manifesting, likening intentions to stones dropped in a pond and arguing that a consistent daily signal across all areas of life outcompetes stronger but sporadic ones in shaping one’s reality.
A personal essay on how reducing commitments, possessions, and relationships frees up attention, which in turn enables focused intention and creative flow, and on trusting a let-go, unscheduled approach to balancing writing, music, art, and language.
A brief method for focusing effort in difficult moments by asking what one needs to BE rather than what one needs to do, letting the desired way of being reveal the concrete actions to take.
An essay challenging the claim that willpower cannot be willed, citing Libet’s experiments and arguing that the will is a trainable muscle, with graduated exercises from the marshmallow test to harder tests of self-discipline.
A candid guide to difficult family relationships, covering when to walk away from abusive or harmful relatives, how to exit gracefully by fading out, and when and how to reconnect once both parties have genuinely evolved.
A description of the one-of-a-kind silver wax stamp the artist uses to mark original paintings and physical artworks, functioning as both a personal signature and an anti-counterfeit measure with hard-to-copy details built in.
A reflective piece on how the body stores trauma and how surgery — even minor procedures — can reawaken buried grief and past trauma, drawing on the author’s own experience and the idea that healing involves both body and mind.
A short note on an abstract jewelry design derived from the author’s Cycle of Human Development model, 3D printed into a necklace and keychain used as personal reminders and as tools for meditation and affirmation work.
A large curated collection of self-reflection questions covering feelings, values, purpose, fears, habits, relationships and self-talk, offered as prompts for self-development and life integration and meant to be worked through only a few at a time.
A brief note on the original concept design for the author’s tattoo, titled Freedom From Chaos, which was later placed winding up her back and around her arm.
A short observation on flat, smooth sand at Half Moon Bay whose color variation creates the illusion of ridges, captured by the author as a reminder that what we see is not always reality.
A reflective essay on choosing to love fully despite inevitable pain, the profound peace found in surrendering to love, and whether lasting peace is simply an open heart held within a carefully constructed boundary.
A brief note on a morning light pattern cast through blinds at a beach house that so caught the author’s eye she recreated its abstract form in artwork.
A philosophical essay tracing how our sense of self evolves through stages of ideology toward ‘there is no self,’ warning against becoming trapped in identifying with our beliefs, and questioning why we look to spiritual and religious ideologies to tell us how to live.
A lighthearted note on a collection of small objects found in a son’s pockets on laundry day in 2013, which the author found visually fun and full of curiosity.
A personal essay on the author’s discomfort with religion, growing up between Methodist and Southern Baptist relatives, and how the same texts are used to justify both love and hate — while sensing a shared truth buried beneath historical context.
An exploration of whether particular life challenges map to specific stages of the author’s development model, finding that some stages attract characteristic struggles while other challenges can strike anytime and pull a person back into earlier stages.
A short note on a minimalist project representing each emotion as line and color, which yielded a color wheel of positive emotions and a matching one for negative emotions that the author found worked perfectly.