A reflective essay naming ‘spiritual fatigue,’ the exhaustion that often follows intense self-development work, and arguing for balancing periods of deep examination with simply living, while staying guarded against relapse into self-sabotage.
An introductory roadmap to self-development presenting the author’s model of universal stages of human growth, synthesized from Kegan, Fowler, and others, framed as the guide she wished she had when her own journey began at thirty-one.
A practical essay on distinguishing an impulse you will later regret from a genuine soul ‘compelling,’ offering rules of thumb, especially that anything rushed or involving spending money is usually impulse rather than intuitive guidance.
A short essay examining worry as a habitual, even addictive, negative emotion, distinguishing worry from stress, questioning what payoff it provides, and inviting the reader to notice the mind’s stories and return to the present.
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.
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.
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 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.
An abstract painting in shades of blue depicting a tiny self floating in the ocean as a great wave approaches, evoking the ambiguity of major, identity-altering change that is neither clearly good nor bad.
A cataloged master list of the roughly sixty most common challenges humans face across mental, emotional, physical, social, financial and whole-life categories, compiled from thousands of survey responses to show how universal and finite our struggles really are.
A photograph capturing the artist’s shadow dancing during a music video for the song “Validation,” used to illustrate the concept of the shadow self, the alter ego, with the less confident real self performing as the shadow of the confident songstress.
A teaching essay on the danger of accepting labels for our core self, from others or from ourselves — distinguishing real, learnable skills from an ever-changing ‘self’ that doesn’t truly exist, and warning how borrowed labels become limiting beliefs.
A teaching essay outlining five kinds of peace — financial, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — arguing that each must be tended, that you must heal yourself before helping others, and describing the marks of peace in each domain.
A personal essay on childhood limiting beliefs that resist removal, offering a technique of completing each negative belief with a positive extension rather than fighting it, then rereading the revised statements often to retrain the mind.
A reflective essay framing the author’s age-31 mid-life crisis as a catalyst for self-development, situating it within the cycle of human development stages and introducing manifesting as a learnable skill for shaping one’s own reality.
A step-by-step guide to manifesting: choosing what to attract, writing it by hand, feeling and acting on inner guidance, plus warnings about manifesting from fear versus love and the difference between influence and control.
A teaching essay proposing that the eleven stages of human development are not a linear staircase but a cycle we traverse repeatedly, with affirmations and daily reminders for spending more time in the later, more peaceful stages.
An overview essay aligning the developmental research of Kegan, Fowler and others into a single eleven-stage cycle spanning social, religious and spiritual growth, described as a circle we travel repeatedly rather than a staircase we climb.
A spiritual essay exploring the idea that everyone you meet embodies some aspect of yourself, arguing that recognizing those reflections makes unkindness impossible while revealing which parts of yourself still need forgiveness.
A raw existential essay, prompted by a birthday, on the temporary and evolving nature of self and world, the absence of inherent purpose, and the conclusion that life may be best treated as a game or vacation worth lightening up about.
An original percussive blues song, with lyrics and playing technique, about how we seek validation from others but can ultimately only give it to ourselves — and how youthful uncertainty opens the door to manipulation and oppression.
A provocative essay arguing that no one truly cares about your self-discovery — and that this is freeing, because the journey’s real destination is realizing there is no fixed self, only the shared oneness beneath every temporary layer.
An essay on the social-media obsession with words — arguing that policing others’ conversations, caging oneself in narrow word-based identities, and treating words as important all miss that words are temporary and that action, not language, carries meaning.
An original love song with chords and lyrics about how another person can reveal the best in us by reflecting their own good qualities back, framed as a discovery of self and gratitude within a close relationship.