Embedded Files
a slow place for things that feel true + notes on being human.
Untamed
"It's OK to feel all the stuff you're feeling. You're just becoming human again. You're not doing life wrong; you're doing it right. If there's any secret you're missing, it's that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that's what they're for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes."
"In the past eighteen years, I have learned two things about pain.
First: I can feel everything and survive. What I though would kill me, didn't.
Second: I can use pain to become. I am here to become truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever."
"I have never been fine…not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the ache: This will pass; stay close.
I have been alive."
"Broken means: does not function as it was designed to function. A broken human is one who does not function the way humans are designed to function. when I think about my own human experiences, and the experiences of every historical and contemporary human being I've ever studies, we all seem to function in the exact same way:
We hurt people and we are hurt by people. We feel left out, envious, not good enough, sick, and tired. We have unrealized dreams and deep regrets. We are certain that we were meant for more and that we don't even deserve what we have. We feel ecstatic and then numb. We wish our parents had done better by us. We wish we could do better by our children. We betray and we are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to. We say goodbye to animals, to places, to people we cannot live without. We are so afraid of dying. Also: of living. We have fallen in love and out of love, and people have fallen in love and out of love with us. We wonder if what happened us that night will mean we can never be touched again without fear. We live with rage bubbling. We are sweaty, bloated, gassy, oily. We love our children, we long for children, we do not want children. We are at war with out bodies, our minds, our souls. We are at war with one another. We wish we'd said all those things while they were still here. They're still here, and we're still not saying those things. We know we won't. We don't understand ourselves. We don't understand why we hurt those we love. We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don't understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved."
"Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway. Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud…Whether you are brave or not cannot be judged by people on the outside. Sometimes being brave requires letting the crowd think you're a coward. Sometimes being brave means letting everyone down but yourself."
"The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me. I quit spending my life trying to control myself and began to trust myself. We only control what we don't trust. We can either control our selves or love ourselves, but we can't do both."
— Untamed, Glennon Doyle
Tension in the Bones
Tension in the Bones
It feels like tension in my bones. Or something so deep I cannot quite get to it. It’s buried beneath the breath.
How do we carry tension that deep?
Maybe this depth is the body protecting us. It knows how to brace, how to hold, how to keep us safe, even beneath the muscles and beneath the breath. Safe from what, I’m not entirely sure. From being too much. From not being enough?
Embodiment carries our untold stories. It asks us to tune in. To stay.
And maybe the real work isn’t forcing it to disappear, or even fully knowing our stories. Maybe it’s just noticing, and slowly teaching the body that it’s safe enough to soften, and to be present with the unknown.
I’m sorry, February newsletter.
There’s nothing I can think to write about this month. February, for me, has been about surviving.
Life has been slow. And don’t get me wrong, I love slow. I really do. But I’ve found that when things stay slow for too long, I start looking for speed somewhere else. This month, that search landed completely in my yoga classes…where I’ve turned into a complete psycho perfectionist, trying to learn more, refine more, get it right.
And that’s the irony. I’m trying to perfect something that probably can’t be perfected. Something that isn’t meant to be learned, but felt. Done. Lived. Let go of.
I keep wishing March promised better weather, as if winter had a clear end date I could stick to. But we all know March has its own moods. February may be the shortest month, yet somehow it often feels the longest.
I’ll be honest…I’m not sure I can drink any more wine, do any more yoga, or read any more books. I’m feeling slightly burnt out, restless. Like I need a change of season, even though it’s still February, and February asks us to endure.
To endure the slowness.
To endure the quiet.
To endure the in-between.
Isn’t it ironic how much of this is exactly what we practice in yoga? Staying with sensation. Pausing instead of rushing to the next shape. Sitting in the space where nothing dramatic is happening, and noticing how quickly the mind wants to escape it, fix it, or improve it. Yoga isn’t just movement; it’s practice in being with what is. Including impatience. Including boredom. Including the urge to make something more out of a moment that’s simply asking to be lived.
And the funny thing is…I know myself well enough to know that once summer begins and life speeds up again, I’ll be craving this pace. This stillness. This very month that feels heavy right now.
So of course February isn’t asking for inspiration, productivity, or growth. Maybe it’s just asking us to stay… to soften our grip on “doing it better”… to survive gently.
If this month feels long for you too, you’re not behind. You’re not failing. You’re just here…moving through a season that doesn’t rush for anyone.
And for now, that’s enough.
Things that feel true lately -
I'm drawn to containment, simplicity, and slowness.
I value guidance.
I want meaning without the hustle.
I resist the pressure for constant output, visibility and self-promotion.
There's relief in being "nobody"- and fear there too.
I'm not here to invent; I'm here to curate and transmit what's meaningful.
What sustains me is regulation, real connection, honoring natural cycles, and protecting my energy.
The mountains steady me & i'm choosing to return to them more often this year.
I talk openly about the grief that can live alongside adoption & motherhood & that has been deeply healing for me.
I'm no longer focused on changing who I am, but on understanding and working with who I am.
I'm here. Fully. A small pause. A steady breath. And a full cup (my most consistent self-care)
"I choose less because more has made me tired, not fulfilled.
I am no longer interested in proving my worth through effort, productivity, or potential.
My life does not need to look impressive to be meaningful.
I refuse the belief that clarity comes from consuming more information.
I trust what has already repeated itself quietly inside me.
I choose fewer voices so I can hear my own.
I choose fewer plans so my body can exhale.
If something costs me my peace, my presence, or my nervous system, it costs too much.
I let my energy, not my ambition, set my limits.
I honor my natural pace, even when it looks slow, unremarkable, or unoptimized.
I trust quiet seasons.
I trust devotion over discipline.
I trust repetition to deepen what novelty never could.
I do not rush to define myself.
I allow meaning to emerge through living, not branding.
I am allowed to love simple things deeply and ignore what does not move me.
I do not need to be interested in everything to be alive.
Rest is not a reward.
Stillness is not a delay.
Enough is not a failure.
I choose a smaller life so I can feel it fully.
This is not retreat.
This is return."
— From the collective
"Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.”
slow down.
drink the coffee.
eat the donut.
then, figure out the things.
Stillness still makes me uncomfortable, even as a Yoga/Meditation "Teacher".
I notice how quickly I reach for something....anything, to justify the act of sitting. A podcast playing softly in the background. A mental checklist running while my body is still. Some small productivity hack to make rest feel earned. Even in moments meant for quiet, I often feel the urge to prove my worth by doing something “useful,” or by listening to someone wiser, smarter, more accomplished than me.
As if stillness alone isn’t enough.
I think 2026 will be a year of presence and intention. I say that knowing I’ve said versions of it before. Presence is always the goal. And yet, it’s amazing how easily it slips through our fingers in modern life. How quickly space fills. How fast the days crowd themselves with noise, input, expectation.
This year, I want to deepen the practice. Not perfect it...deepen it. I want to give myself more space and fewer to-do’s. To schedule creativity and play with the same seriousness I once reserved for productivity. To worry less about BEING less. To stop believing that doing more will finally make me feel like enough.
I suspect this is a practice I’ll be working on forever.
Recently, I looked up my personal year in numerology. Apparently, this is a three—associated with expression, lightness, letting life move again. Finding your voice. Curiosity instead of pressure. Pleasure instead of proving. Less seriousness. Less effort to justify existence. Less inner narration pushing me toward some imagined future where I finally arrive.
That framing felt like permission.
Around the same time, I read a blog post by Mary Beth LaRue. In her words: delete, delete, delete. Less is more—for me.
I don’t think this is a universal truth. Some people expand beautifully through accumulation, I'm sure. But for me, it couldn’t be truer.
There are things I’ll probably always want more of: knowledge, caffeine, money (specifically for travel), cats, dogs, cute coffee mugs, crew neck sweatshirts. But beyond a few honest indulgences, I don’t need more. I need depth.
This feels like the year of a less manifesto.
I don’t want to widen my life anymore. I want to sink into it. I want to go deeper into the few things I already love instead of constantly trying to become someone who loves more things. I’ve spent a long time wishing I were more diverse—someone who reads every genre, watches every show, experiments with fashion, collects hobbies the way I prefer to collect mugs.
But I’m not that person.
I like what I like...with intensity. With devotion. With depth. And I’m finally starting to see that this isn’t a limitation. It’s a truth my bones have known all along.
What I need now is acceptance. I need to stop trying to rewire myself into someone more impressive, more versatile, more interesting by external standards. I need to stop treating my natural preferences as something to fix.
Less striving. Less explaining. Less performing.
More presence. More depth. More honesty about what actually feels pleasant, interesting, and true.
I don’t need a louder life. I need a quieter one that I can actually hear myself inside of.
So this year, I’ll continue deleting...not dramatically, not aggressively, but intentionally. I’m deleting excess, noise, and the belief that my worth is tied to constant output. I’m making room for stillness, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
Because maybe stillness doesn’t need to be earned.
Maybe sitting, breathing, and being here is already enough.
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