We’ve been fed a steady stream of headlines, all designed to hijack our nervous systems…

”New revelations from Epstein files take a toll…”
“Epstein emails thrust Trump back into the spotlight over past ties…”
“He Breaks Silence On Explosive Abuse Claims…”

These headlines do more than inform our minds. They enter our bodies. They pierce our eyes. Tighten our jaws. Harden our bellies. They make the erotic feel dangerous and contaminated.

In moments like these, we see the shameful shadows of power, sex and abuse. We watch helplessly as information unfolds before our eyes showing how disgusting the bearers of wealth live…and fuck.

What many of us resort to doing as a means of control is vent about how disturbing it is to our friends, and we dwell in the nausea of it all.

Over time, this constant exposure to harmful narratives without accountability teaches our nervous systems that sexuality is something to brace against. In this siphoning of erotic life force through spectacle, shame, commodification, we disconnect from our own aliveness.

This is not accidental, it’s colonial.

Before colonization and racialized control of the body, many of our lineages held eros differently. Desire was braided with ritual, land, fertility, creativity, and spirit. Eros was a critical and sacred part of humanity. In South Asian, Japanese and many other ancient traditions, texts and cosmology honored sexual union as an unashamed pathway to divine embodiment. Across these cultures, eros was a portal into the sacred.

Colonization didn’t just take land, it disorganized intimacy, pleasure, gender, and the body itself. The erotic body became something to be controlled, surveilled, exploited and punished.

The result? Shame. Silencing voice. Burned out nervous systems. Disconnection from pleasure, intuition, and creative power.

I, Chetna, only realized recently that I couldn’t even let myself playfully flirt with people across gender because I was afraid it was manipulative, selfish, or entering me into a sexual contract that I’d be obligated to fulfill. This patriarchal conditioning cut off my vitality and joy that wants to express in harmless, flirtatious affection.

The erotic is vitality. It’s the spark that animates creativity, intimacy, curiosity, and imagination. It’s the same force that makes seeds sprout, rivers move, and artists create. When this force is shamed or siphoned away, entire communities lose access to their creative and spiritual power. It robs us of what makes us human.

This is our public service announcement and call to action:

Let’s refuse the diversion. Let’s invest actively in the sacred work of our erotic vitality!

The erotic is the pulse, the subtle yet powerful intelligence, that tells us when something is aligned, inspiring and juicy in us! It’s not about becoming louder in the chaos of polycrisis, but about becoming more rooted in our aliveness.

When we reclaim our erotic life force, we reclaim:

• Our body wisdom and awareness

• Our courage to feel rather than to numb

• Our sacral–throat connection that restores our voice and self-trust

• Our capacity to orient toward desire instead of fear

• Our ancestral lineages that once held eros as holy

Reclaiming the erotic is not only about pleasure. In order for us to feel the heights of our pleasure, we need to discover the depth of our grief. Reclaiming the erotic asks us to grieve…

Grieve the ways our bodies learned to hide.
Grieve the desires that were shamed into silence.
Grieve the identities we built in order to survive systems that feared our colorful aliveness.

Reclamation work is grief work; a turning of the soil so that our buried sorrow can breathe. And because our aliveness can’t emerge from beneath the heavy weight of buried sorrow from even our ancestors, erotic reclamation is also ancestral repair.

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There is a story most Japanese children do not actually grow up hearing; a quiet, unmistakable erasure. There was a time when the sun goddess, Amaterasu, hid herself in a cave in grief, and took all the light with her. Everything started dying. The gods, worried that the world would collapse, tried everything: prayers, offerings, dignified ceremonial gestures. It all failed. Only when every ‘respectable’ instrument had been exhausted did someone reach for Ame-no-Uzume-no-Mikoto (天宇受売命) the goddess whose name translates roughly as “the goddess that conducts heavenly dances.” She came and danced outside the cave ecstatically. Without apology, she bare her breasts and pushed her skirt-cord down to her genitals. The gods erupted in laughter so alive that Amaterasu cracked the cave door open to see what could possibly be that joyful in a world without light.

What brought the light back was not piety. It was eros. The full, unmodified aliveness of a woman who had not been taught to doubt her own body as an instrument of healing. In the depth of the darkness, there is dazzling light without source. Ame-no-Uzume is that cosmic eros… the energy that wants to create itself over and over.

I, Aki, grew up in Japan yet did not grow up with this story as living inheritance. The part that stays with me is not that she danced. It is that she was the last resort. This is what colonization of the mind and society does: it turns our most potent medicine into a joke and then teaches us to tell it that way ourselves. The sanitized, puritanical lens that produced the new version of Japanese femininity so desired and fetishized by the West (the docile, demure, behind-the-scenes good wife or mistress) is nothing like Ame-no-Uzume, who saved the world from disintegrating with her naked, thundering, divinely possessed body.

The patriarchal system does not fear the maiden or the mother; what it cannot tolerate is Ame-no-Uzume, the Shakti that cannot be negotiated with, the Kali who will not soften her face, the erotic that insists on taking up space as the first offering rather than the last resort.

When we reclaim our eros, we breathe fresh air into the rot, and we let it compost into Black Gold. We interrupt cycles of shame and silence by uplifting our lineages that honored land, ritual, creativity, and desire before those ways were severed. We recognize what shaped us through trauma, and consciously choose what shapes us next.

We are calling in those who feel the exhaustion of outrage cycles. Those who feel their life force being drained by endless spectacle. Those who are ready to reimagine their relationship to desire, embodiment, and the sacred.

This summer at Kripalu, we gather as people ready for a Sacred Erotic Reclamation. To tend, grieve, and feel the inherent creativity in our bodies and our aliveness!

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The sun had set and the sky was gray by the time I drove home from the beach the other day. Crawling in thick traffic on the Richmond Bridge, I imagined the distant future when I’d eventually arrive home to my quiet, dimly-lit studio to eat a cold quinoa salad alone.

With that anticipation came an achy desire:

I want to hear from him (let’s call him Bob).
I want him to enthusiastically choose me.
I want him to want me!

In the past, such desire would’ve triggered a cascade of strategy, judgment and dismissal.

Should I text him? I could play it cool…maybe ask about the event this weekend or something.
Why hasn’t he reached out to me though?! He’s probably not that into me. This always freaking happens.
Why do I even like Bob? He’s so basic and clearly doesn’t know how lucky he is.
WTF, Chetna. Get over it, damn!

But this time, I didn’t go down those desperately outdated rabbit holes.

I’ve been shedding old patterns like snakeskin and orienting toward boldness this year. As our world burns with war, collapse, and humans digging deeper our own grave on this planet, I inquire daily about how the heck to be and show up fully to life right now. With the beauty and violence of Spring bursting forth in wildflowers and buzzing bees full-bellied with honey, the same message keeps finding me:

“Feel. Feel. Feel!”

From my inner guides.
From the wind caressing desert rock, and the tiny yellow flowers sprinkled at the feet of ancient Yuccas, and the Cholla spines I’m drawn to touch *ooo ouch*.
From The Emerald podcast on These Mythic Times and Powers, Great and Small.
And from my own body interrupting me when I try to think my way out.

So instead of turning my desire into an intellectualized abstract, I turned toward the sensations of desire in my body…

I felt a big bubble in my stomach.
Tightness in my chest.
Tingles in my thighs.
Within seconds, I felt chills.
Waves moving up and down my torso as I slowly edged forward, with the traffic.
Yoni contracting and expanding.
Totally unfounded, almost inappropriate in that context, I felt…orgasmic!

Sitting there among my fellow commuters, I was still 45 minutes away from that lonely leftover meal. Bob sure as hell hadn’t texted me. And yet, I was buzzing.
Not because anything was happening outside of me, but because I was letting something happen inside of me.

The next morning, I woke up with a kind of clarity and energy that made no sense for 5:30am on day two of my menstrual cycle. Something about being with my desire the night before—not acting on it, not suppressing, analyzing or invalidating it—had sharpened and energized me (much like good sex does).

To let myself want like that…is not casual. It opens me up to feeling a lot. Feeling pleasure and clarity, yes! Also feeling hurt, selfish, pathetic, unreasonable, and more ache without promise of being mutually wanted by another.

So I, like many of us, have been far more practiced at managing desire than feeling it. I know how to play it cool, conceal and pretend that I don’t want anything. I know how to cut someone off before I can be rejected by them. I know how to shame or collapse desire entirely and convince myself I don’t even want it.

I also know how to go after what I want. I know how to chase with persistence and discipline. I want peace, love and freedom on earth? I know how to turn that into action and orient my life around it while calling it my mission (supported by the “entrepreneurial work ethic” aka workaholism aka addiction).

And sometimes, I know how to get what I want. I can impact others and leave them feeling more peaceful, loving and free. I see how I’m important, chosen and needed. It’s fun and inspiring! I feel satisfied.

Until I don’t. Until the energy flatlines and I get restless again. The treadmill is running 24/7 for us hungrily seeking the next person, peak experience or dopa hit.

Want.
Get.
Flatline.
Rinse n’ Repeat.

This loop is deeply grooved. But what I’m realizing is that it bypasses something really, really important. That moment on the bridge showed me that raw desire, before the loop, is itself vital, satisfying and generative.

And I wonder, what if wanting is not a problem to fix or a trigger to follow…but a portal that opens up when we let ourselves feel?

To let myself want like this…is also not personal. Fully feeling desire is a quietly radical act of resistance in society that numbs and commodifies human longing. When capitalism says:

You want something? → Buy it! Earn it! Sell it! Bop it!

Feeling the aliveness of my desire is a bigass orgasmic middle finger to alla that. Capitalism doesn’t want people to feel. Because if we felt, we’d also have to grieve.
Grieve how much we reach for quick, artificial fixes instead of real intimacy.
Grieve how much of our world is built on numbing and distraction.
Grieve the violence it takes to sustain that pace..the extraction, the waste, the disconnection from land, body and one another.

Because when I feel, I fuck up the status quo fueled by ceaselessly chasing what I’ve been conditioned to want.

“For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves…

But giving in to the fear of feeling is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.”

Audre Lorde

Desire, like grief, asks us to Feel. And when felt fully, it rounds the jagged edges of our strategies, judgments and dismissals like a rock smoothed by water over time.

When I feel the creative, erotic life force energy of my desire, it becomes a different fuel that clarifies and expands intimacy with myself. My desire doesn’t belong to anyone else. It’s moving through me! It belongs to me! I get to feel it and be fed by it first!

And from this embodied place, I can step forward even more vitally in my mission, pursuits and choices.

To want is to be in aliveness.

Getting what I desire is not the source of my power. Exploring the portal of fully feeling my desire is. It makes aliveness available to me immediately, before and despite the getting. Even through the sensations of rejection, grief or ache in my body, I get to feel my vitality.

And when I let myself feel fully, I AM ALIVE.

And you, lovely reader, how does your desire feel in your body?

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I’ll be at Bioneers this year holding a session on Coloring for Compassion and Inter-Being, with the Compassion in Times of Fascism Coloring Book.

I still have openings for a couple new clients in 1:1 Creative Alchemy sessions this Spring. To help our alchemical bodies to access its inherent, illogical and creative intelligence needed right now. Let’s chat.

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I love the Bay Area. It’s saturated with radical intelligence, niche healing spaces, and explicit and nuanced privilege that I both benefit from and question.

In a recent conversation with other local facilitators, we reflected on how so many of us here know the language of liberation; we read the books, we attend the panels and unconferences, we politicize our play and our plant medicine ceremonies.

And yet, we wondered: are some of our healing spaces just…anesthetic? Helping us cope inside fucked up systems that serve us and harm others farther away?

I don’t know. Quite possibly.

As I prepare to facilitate an in-person, 5-week series called Compassion in Times of Collapse, I’ve been sitting with some questions:

Does this work actually matter right now?
Or is it just another soothing layer over violence?
Is “compassion” indulgent when people are being detained, displaced, brutalized?
Should we be at the frontlines instead?

What I do know is that compassion isn’t about comfort. It’s about capacity.

Compassion, at its root, means to be with suffering; our own and that of those near and far from us.
To be with land under extraction.
To be with people detained in cages.
To be with more species, cultures and communities going extinct.
To be with our own complicity.

Compassion asks: what allows us to stay present without collapsing, numbing or hardening?

For most of my adult life, I’ve managed to leave or escape somehow when I felt that deepening in community was too much.

I didn’t leave dramatically or in rupture. Just spaciously, even adventurously. I traveled. I relocated. I sought new environments and conversations and stimuli.

But I was also conveniently avoiding the persistence that intimacy and community-building requires.

Over the last year especially, I’ve heard the same advice:
”Find your people. Mutual aid. Co-regulation. Build community!”

For the first time since my undergrad experience, I am showing up week after week in community spaces. Seeing the same faces in dance and meditation places. Sitting with the same humans in shared-identity circles. Returning to a rotating dinner table where dynamics unfold instead of reset.

And staying has required me to shed layers of perfectionism.
It’s challenged the quiet belief that belonging must be earned through brilliance, clarity, fluency, or ease. When I show up regularly, people see me tired. Irritated. Misattuned. Human.

And I see them that way too.

Dynamics get nuanced. Someone says something that lands wrong. Someone doesn’t follow through with their word. Someone feels distant.

Instead of disappearing or creating more distance to reset the tension, I’m practicing staying. Staying to acknowledge dynamics. Disrupt dynamics. Tend to dynamics so that they strengthen trust instead of stagnate or erode it.

I’m learning that right relationship doesn’t mean best friendship with everyone. It means clearing my own tensions so I can remain present. It means not outsourcing my nervous system regulation to novelty or escape.

Even when I’m committed to staying, I’ve noticed how my system can create distance internally. It can show up as social anxiety: hypervigilance, resentment, judgment of myself and others.

Through my compassion practices, I can soften the anxiety. And in that softening, something subtler emerges: spaciness, a quiet detachment. I see how this also is protection. And I am motivated to metabolize it too, at the pace of trust.

In meeting these layers upon layers, compassion has felt less like a passive or abstract ideal, and more like a discipline that requires patient and gritty training.

And so I ask again: if we can’t be with tension or suffering, in ourselves and in our communities, how do we create alchemy through long-term resistance?

Compassion helps me reopen my heart when it wants to shut down.
It helps me stay connected to myself and the people beside me.
It gives my system space to recover and return, again again again.
It interrupts the conditioned impulse to dehumanize myself and others.
It supports belonging that’s embodied and consistent rather than temporary and performative.

In this wild world unraveling at a speed faster than ever, I’m practicing something slower: Staying. And compassionately growing my nervous system’s capacity to be with.

This, perhaps, is the ground of Cultivating Compassion in Times of Collapse. Not a refuge from the world, but a place to practice staying with it.

There will be opportunities to extend that practice outward, including writing letters to people detained by ICE and committing to compassionate action beyond the room.

We don’t practice compassion to become “good at compassion,” just as we don’t meditate to become “good at meditation.”

We practice so our hearts can be fiercely open.
So our nervous systems can grow more resilient.
So we can sit at the table with what’s happening in the world and not abandon ourselves or one another.

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Sliding scale and energy exchange options available until 3/10

I’ll be facilitating a session at Bioneers this year on Coloring for Compassion and Inter-Being, leveraging the Compassion in Times of Fascism Coloring Book

I currently have openings for a couple new clients in 1:1 Creative Alchemy sessions. Our work in this space is to help the alchemical body arrive at enough regulation to access its inherent profound, illogical and creative intelligence that’s needed from us right now. Learn more and book a discovery call.

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I’ve been that friend who introduces people to limerence like it’s a new podcast they need to know about.

Leaning into it, I’m writing yet another piece on this fantastically exquisite, incredibly destabilizing experience of being intensely infatuated with someone whose reciprocation is uncertain or…nonexistent.

Many sources identify limerence as a sad side effect of an empty life. For me, it’s something older and more intelligent than that; rooted in migration, imagination, and mucho grief.

Deep roots

I’ve read many times the idea that limerence happens when your life isn’t interesting enough. That people with flat lives resort to limerent fantasy. Perhaps that’s true for some.

It isn’t true for me. My days are made up of meaningful work, spacious creative playtime, learning, community and unprecedented freedom. Yet still, limerence has built many other worlds in me. Its roots go deeper.

Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow about the grief that comes from generations who migrated and left beloveds and land behind. Ancestors who found it difficult to sustain traditions that had nourished their people for hundreds or thousands of years.

“They lived betwixt and between the Old and the New worlds, attempting to create something that would enable them to endure. Without the protective shelter of the village, they often coped in ways that created a secondary layer of suffering: alcoholism, isolation, rage, and a restrictive silence that cut them off from the living support of others.”

When the village dissolves, the human psyche improvises.
Some of us drink, or go silent, or rage.
Some of us fantasize. And I’ve built a bakery from breadcrumbs.

When my parents crossed oceans to the U.S., sight unseen, with two small kids, they were crafting a life from scratch. Love and effort were present, but capacity was sorely limited. Mom applied for a Green Card to escape a prison of being the first daughter-in-law in a patriarchal, paternalist home. Before that, my ancestors moved through Apartheid South Africa after migrating from India, living inside systems that severed belonging and put us against each other. Loneliness and fragmentation flow through our bloodline. Do you relate to this, dear reader?

My nervous system learned early that love comes in pieces. I got incredibly creative and resourceful with intermittent attention and affection; I baked up the crumbs into dozens of ooey gooey chocolate croissants, even if they were holographic.

In my therapeutic work with clients, we actively refuse to reduce systemic or ancestral wounds to personal character flaws. Migration, patriarchy, racialized isolation, displacement; these are not individual failures. They are environments that shape our nervous systems. Coping through fantasy, collapse, overachievement, addiction, emotional distance is…adaptation, and resilience.

Adaptive intelligence

Limerence is both an imaginative adaptation and a protective habit. It’s the ability to take bits of relational information and construct a fully safe habitat. Its social intelligence turned inward. Entire conversations, emotional arcs, visionary futures…without negotiating anyone else’s traumas.

Today, children who have invisible friends are called creative. But for decades, psychologists considered imaginary companions a red flag and a sign of loneliness or pathology. More recent research connects having imaginary friends to advanced social skills, verbal fluency, and creativity. Limerence is not so different; adult imaginary friends…but with spicier chemistry.

There have been moments when fantasy was the only place I felt fully chosen, desired and prioritized. The external world didn’t always offer that in ways I felt capable of receiving, so I gave it to myself in the comfort of my jersey sheets.

After my divorce five years ago, limerence became my chocolate fudge every night after dinner. Sweetness and excitement when real life felt too vulnerable. A pleasure that’s indulgently protected me from rejection, but has also kept me from the discipline of intimacy.

True costs

This Year of the Snake has been…confronting. Showing me the grave restrictions of this sweet, sweet habit.

Limerence has isolated me. It’s kept me inside the echo chambers of my projections. It turns real people into characters in a private screenplay. No one can live up to a fantasy version of themselves. And I remain disconnected because I was never relating to them as they are.

Three and a half years into recovery, I keep seeing the layers of my addiction beyond substance. I see the trappings of dopamine. The high of anticipation. The self-administered intensity…like binging Heated Rivalry or The Handmaid’s Tale.

While limerence was an intelligent adaptation at one point, the current truth is, I’m not the little girl needing to turn crumbs into fake feasts anymore. I have a village of real and available love in my life. And a nervous system that can tolerate reality.

As long as I am energetically entangled with fantasy, I am not fully available for the beautiful, messy people and opportunities beaming right in front of me.

Shedding layers

I’ve been peeling off the safe skins of limerence. Not in a straight line or one-and-done kind of way, but in steady spiral upward. These are the practices I return to daily as I expand the capacity of my attachment system.

I make the choice to let it go

I could keep living inside limerence and enjoy the safety of my fantasies. I could just consult with Chad the chatbot and let it validate me forever. I could meet people on the apps who scratch the itch and never ask anything deeper of me. “Intimacy” without vulnerability is rampant.

But I want the gritty, magical work of slowly building and tending real, multi-dimensional connections. Co-regulating with other nervous systems, navigating conflict and allowing it to deepen the spirit of our relations. In a time of fast hook-ups and hyper-simulation, this feels quietly countercultural.

I notice the hooks

Limerence still works its way in easily, sometimes vividly, sometimes subtly. Anyone else hooked on visions of a private show from Bad Bunny where he is wearing his Calvin Kleins and hablando en español de su pasión por Puerto Rico?!

I don’t demonize the fantasies. Sometimes I’ll give myself five minutes in the shower to let it play out. When it arises, I see it, I enjoy it.

But I’m refusing to let it run my attachment system. I tenderly recognize the younger part of me that turned to this strategy for excitement and care. This often softens the hook.

I grieve the highs

Shedding is progressive. And grief is part of it.

Fantasy gives me control, safety, fast intensity without relational risk or negotiation. I’m warm in my soft bedsheets while ecstatic-dancing in Bali with a tall, dark, and handsome man who mirrors my hips perfectly. And then I’m introducing him to my parents and we’re taking a family vacay to Puerto Escondido.

Reality gives me ambiguity, unpredictability, even actual mutuality. We have fun dancing, but his breath smells like garlic and I keep awkwardly stepping on his toes. Then we plan to meet for dinner 3 weeks later due to our busy schedules and work travel.

Limerence is operatic and protects me from being ordinary in love. But real love is woven together by ordinary moments. I’ve had to grieve the version of myself who needs to get flooded with a cinematic overwhelm in relationships. I’ve had to grieve the high, and the safety.

In early recovery from weed, my taste buds dulled. I remember eating the most colorful, saucy avocado toast and eggs, and it all tasted…bleh. Over time, subtlety returned and thankfully, flavors grew nuanced again.

Shedding limerence has been similar. Without fantasy spikes, the mundane can feel theatrically…bleh. Choosing to let go is trusting that in the boredom, something steadier is growing.

I give it up to God

When the fantasy loops keep playing or it feels too scary to let it go, I enlist the support of my higher powers. When my human will falls short, which is often does, I let the divine hold it with me.

I give my imagination to prayer instead of projection. I write down what I need to let go of and then burn it ceremonially. I speak out to a Redwood what I need to release and leave it for compost.

I value the actual data

Do I feel safe with them or just activated? Have we exchanged more than ten meaningful words? Are they clearly in love with someone else? Have weeks passed without any real effort from them to connect?

Limerence thrives on ambiguity, and clarity pops that bubble real quick.

I engage with reality

This is the hardest part because at the least, it requires my non-judgmental observation, and at most, my bold authenticity.

So, I’ve invited them out to tea or a walk; and realized that they’re not capable of transparent communication about what they’re even available for.
Pop!

I’ve asked them direct questions; and scared them away after inquiring about their stances on feminism and Palestine.
Pop!

I’ve let conversations unfold in daylight; and learned that they too love their limerent escapades, but are choosing to stay there.
Pop!

Testing reality only works when I am more committed to truth than to the high. And sometimes, I backslide. I retreat to bed and feast on the safe, controlled crumbs of my fantasies. Hence the spiral, and the progressive practice of choosing to let it go, giving it up to God, and grieving…again and again.

So what’s here after some shedding?

Peace and quiet. A vast imaginal realm that’s occasionally filled with dramatic monologues about dying alone. Also, a fire to be bold in my real life.

I’m acclimating my nervous system to desire that moves at the pace of trust, not obsession. I’m clarifying reality with my observation and micro-courageous actions. I’m letting my longing occupy its rightful place not as a key ingredient for holographic baking, but a portal back to myself and to God.

And you, lovely reader, what’s your relationship to limerence?

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Upcoming Offerings

These are some spaces where I’m metabolizing the feels, and practicing compassion, creativity, and care alongside our marches and mutual aid and other forms of activism.

Sliding scale is available, a couple spaces are open for energy exchange.

I’ll be at Bioneers this year holding a session on Coloring for Compassion and Inter-Being, with the Compassion in Times of Fascism Coloring Book.

I still have openings for a couple new clients in 1:1 Creative Alchemy sessions. To help our alchemical bodies access its inherent, illogical and creative intelligence needed right now. Let’s chat.

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With community, I’m reading Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. We’ve been spending time with what Weller calls the third gate of grief: the Sorrows of the World. The many layered griefs moving through our social, ecological, and political lives and bodies.

Here’s a poem that emerged from sitting with some of that sorrow. It lets me be human inside the inhumanity, and I want to give it breath here with you.

My heart has been callused lately.
Still beating. Still loyal somehow. Yet holding more
than a drop is ever meant to contain.

I focus on deadlines, sharing my work,
savoring chai, and scarfing down jalapeño chips
while in the heavy reverie of Heated Rivalry.

She pulses with ache when witnessing queer love,
she glimmers at kids giggling and a sky illuminated in pinks,
she pendulates between gravity and levity when something so beautiful…
a butterfly, a hummingbird…
can’t be kept, even in sight.

Some days, she makes her demands.
Sadness envelops me for no clear reason.
Sorrow swallows who I think I am.
She wants to be held in a cocoon, or a tomb.

When I bring her to the forest
she weeps puddles that turn into cenotés.
We give space to feel the wounds of our genocides.
She drops beyond economies, into ecologies…
loss of species, languages, cultures, lineages, lovers.

What else is there to do now but fill the cavernous pools
for neon-colored froggies to spelunk again?
Water from these eyes is an offering to the rock
so the only thing left when fire evaporates all else
is salt.

Dear reader, how’s your heart?

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Upcoming Offerings

These are some spaces where I’m metabolizing grief and practicing compassion, creativity, and nervous system care in the midst of it all, for myself and those who want to practice together.

Compassion is a political act that resists dehumanization, hate, and numbness. It’s a capacity we can strengthen, especially in hard times. Art, color, and beauty are not luxuries; they are historically rooted practices of survival, resistance, and transformation. This series is a sanctuary so we can stay present, connected and alive together. An early bird rate is available until 2/15, and then sliding scale.

I’ll be facilitating a session at Bioneers this year on Coloring for Compassion and Inter-Being, leveraging the Compassion in Times of Fascism Coloring Book.

I currently have openings for a couple new clients in 1:1 Creative Alchemy sessions. Our work in this space is to help the alchemical body arrive at enough regulation to access its inherent profound, illogical and creative intelligence that’s needed from us right now. Learn more and book a discovery call.

Subscribe now

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As a kid, I’d nag my mom, “I’m bored!” Sounding an alarm as if I had a gnawing toothache.

Being bored felt like something bad: annoying, painful, an absence to be filled right away with something more exciting.

One of the take-aways from the Arts of Social Change Jam last month was this: boredom is an ally to creativity…

But there’s always so much to do! What does that even mean? Is it not utterly and selfishly indulgent to be bored in a time when I need to useful, productive, effective?!

I want to explore here where boredom might come from and then how it could be a worthwhile experience, or portal.

Boredom as withdrawal

Do you know that ache of coming to a quiet empty home after a vibrantly social day? Or spending a Friday night alone? Or the restlessness when dopamine stops firing from novelty, drama, or productivity?

Boredom can be a withdrawal symptom from stimulation. I and many of us are used to micro-doses of excitement fed to us throughout the day: messages, screens, conversations, deadlines, romance, fantasies. When those hyperactive inputs stop, my attention starts pacing: Feed me feed me feed me, it bemoans like a hungry freaking ghost.

Boredom as a nudge

When I’ve been in my comfort zone for too long, and not stretching beyond what’s familiar, cue in boredom to nudge me to grow.

In the early pandemic, being indoors all day in quarantine meant being steeped in the same air, the same temperature, the same loop. One day, I started taking cold showers (and showering more than 3 times a week in general). It was super uncomfortable…and life-changing! Coming out of the shower, I’d feel fresh and spritely, exuberant even! I let my boredom crack open a refreshing doorway to more vitality.

Boredom as serenity

I once heard this formula in a 12-step recovery circle:

Boredom + gratitude = serenity.

It struck me. Since learning this, another voice has emerged beside the hungry ghosts in me when I’m bored, “Wow, I get to have this time and space.”

Gratitude is a prayer, and boredom creates space for it. What a personal, interpersonal, and global gift: to embody serenity in a chaotic world. If that’s not a significant enough type of activism, I don’t know what is.

In recovery, I’ve also been contemplating emotional sobriety. This means resisting the urge to chase the drama, the excitement, the big ups and downs. It’s the dopamine fast, the contentment in the clarity (and boredom) of secure relationships, the slow wind-down after an eventful day, the peace and quiet of a restful Friday night. It’s the Vipasanna practice of equanimity.

Emotional sobriety to me is a deeper layer of recovery from addiction, where the focus is developing presence with emotions rather than numbing, avoiding, or overindulging in them. It’s a concept Western culture doesn’t quite understand. I barely do, but it touches something deep in me and I hope to reflect on it more here in the future.

Boredom as rebellion

Boredom is a rebellion against capitalism’s tempo. Boredom is often seen as a failure of sorts, a sign that we’re not optimizing, producing, entertaining, doing enough. The passing thought crossed me that I could get “cancelled” for this post; what a (shameful) privilege it is to be bored when people are dying—do something!!!

It’s true, being bored can be a privilege, but not a shameful one. Before industrial time and digital life, humans lived with long stretches of slowness. Walking, weaving, cooking, staring at fire... What’s now called “boredom” was once the natural and ancestral rhythm of being fucking alive. And now in this modern world designed to keep us scrolling, producing, performing, boredom is…an act of rebellion: I will not fill every silence with noise. My aliveness is not measured by how entertained or busy I am.

Boredom as a portal

My ego, used to the activity and drama of modernity, experiences slowing down as a scary dullness or void. But when I’ve leaned into boredom, I’ve seen that beneath the need for entertainment lies an unmet need for something deeper. Boredom arises when the surface of my conscious mind starts to settle like as still lake. And I can see more clearly beneath the surface.

Mystics like John O’Donohue and Thomas Merton wrote that boredom is the veil between the outer noise and the inner music. If we can stay and not reach for our phones, fantasies, or to-do lists, boredom dissolves into silence, and silence reveals what’s always been there: awareness, imagination, communion.

In this sense, boredom doesn’t come from lack, it arises from abundance that we haven’t yet tuned into. The field of potentiality feels “empty” only because I’m not yet listening deeply enough.

When I’m not chasing the next thrill, and when I can pause long enough (even for 5 minutes!) to feel the still hum underneath my restlessness, my creative muses sing.

Boredom as space for the creative muse

Sometimes I’m bored with my morning pages. They feel repetitive, like wading through sludge. I often write, “What else?” or “I don’t know what to fill these three pages with.”

But every now and then, a pattern emerges from the depths; a glimmer of truth, a forgotten desire, a quiet directive. Sometimes it’s as small as, “include emotional sobriety in your boredom essay.” Sometimes it requires more orchestration, “go to Colombia again.”

When I stop chasing or doing, I notice how much energy I have to listen and then create. My nervous system slows enough for creativity to arise not from urgency, but from stillness. It’s not the electric burst of inspiration that comes with mania or romance. It’s something steadier, still, trustworthy.

The muse doesn’t always arrive in tsunamis of inspiration. Sometimes she trickles in during the quiet idle hours, with ripples that can slowly change everything.

Dear reader, what’s your relationship to boredom?

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On my 38th birthday at the beginning of this month, I was surrounded by nine South Asian creatrixes and sisters at an eight-day artist residency.

Birthdays have long been tender terrain for me. For years, I’ve kept my birthdays safely quiet and contemplative, avoiding the vulnerability of being seen or centered. Last year, I spent it alone at Harbin Hot Springs (the irony of being naked among strangers). This year, I was emotionally naked among friends (and that was somehow more terrifying).

Even as I long to be cherished and adored, I fear it too. When my friends offered to hold an appreciation circle for me, my first instinct was to control. “Can you write your affirmations down instead so I can read them (alone) later?” I asked, trying to ration sweetness, to make the love “safe” and digestible.

But through a conversation with two sisters in the group, Vinitha and Sonya, I softened and released my tendency to keep it all together. Through snotty tears, I voiced the fears that lived in my chest: that being celebrated might make me seem entitled, that shining too brightly could threaten our connection, that I’ll burden or inconvenience them.

They listened without fixing. They stayed.

During the appreciation circle, their hands rested on my feet, shoulders, and arms. One by one, these women spoke words that saw me, unraveled me, and asked nothing in return. My body alternated between wanting to run and wanting to melt. It was uncomfortable. And it was healing.

The next day, I found myself laying low and needing more space from all that intimacy. When I have deeply connective experiences, there’s often a natural pendulation: a blooming, then a contracting. I’ve learned to meet this rhythm with compassion, forgiving my nervous system as it acclimates to new realities and expands its capacity for love.

A few evenings later, we reflected collectively on what secure love meant. Aparna talked about how secure love is built over time. Shilpa shared advice she once received from someone coincidentally named Nitin, like my father, about how in long-term partnership, we play out many archetypes with each other; sometimes lovers, sometimes siblings, sometimes parents, sometimes housemates. Secure love lets us shapeshift.

I thought of how, over the days of the residency, I had shapeshifted too between many parts: a guarded teenager, a disciplined artist, a tender child, an over-thinker, a hopeless romantic, an affirming friend. And in each part, my sisters met me with compassion and love.

Holding grace with myself as I bloomed and contracted and bloomed again was also a form of secure love with myself as I kindly stayed with me through my closings and openings.

Secure love, I’m realizing, isn’t about maintaining one or a few fixed selves. It’s the safety that allows transformation. The kind of love that says: You can change, and I’ll still be here.

As I’ve been confronting my own anxious and avoidant attachment patterns (phew! 😮‍💨), this experience felt like spiritual re-parenting. My sisters’ steady presence steadied my nervous system. It was simple and consistent: checking in, offering tea, giving space, naming truths gently.

I saw how often I’ve tried to curate my own receiving…choosing when and how to be loved, editing how others get to see me. I’m learning that love doesn’t need to be titrated to breadcrumbs (which I’ve settled for too many times). I’m learning how to take love in fully, with less shrinking, apologizing, or controlling how it comes and how I am in it.

In letting myself be celebrated, I could feel the ghosts of old beliefs surfacing and loosening; the belief that joy must be earned, that being lifted up is entitlement, that being seen leads to disconnection.

Secure love lets me shapeshift between fear and openness, self-protection and surrender…without losing my ground. It gives me the courage to stay with myself through it all.

I didn’t know then that this lesson would become the foundation for another one soon after…on the spell-casting of truth-telling.

But that’s another story.

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At the Arts for Social Change Jam that I co-facilitated and participated in last week, a single phrase kept rippling through me:

It all belongs.

I was sitting in a circle of 16 artists, organizers, feelers, dreamers…each of us asking big questions:

• How do we make art when the planet is on fire and entire lineages and communities are dying?

• How do we make collective impact with our personal creative practices?

• How do we stay open when our hearts are heavy with grief and longing?

• How do we deal with burn-out, fear, doubt and uncertainty in the vast mystery before us?

I could feel the collective ache beneath these questions: the ache of sensitive people wanting so much to make an impact, the fear of doing too little or feeling too much, the yearning to belong while daring to take up space with our needs and dreams.

And through it all, three words kept returning like a steady drip.

It all belongs

I’ve heard Tara Brach say these words many times. But it was different to feel them alive in my body, reverberating through the circle.

That first morning, I woke up with a familiar social anxiety. My inner critic was loud and insistent: You’re so awkward. You make people uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say to you, you’re so unapproachable.

Usually when this voice arrives, I rush to analyze, compare, or shrink. But as I looked up at the ancient Redwoods towering above me in the Santa Cruz forest, the words it all belongs landed like a cool mist on my skin.

Each flicker of inadequacy. Each wave of fear. Even the inner critic trying so hard to protect me. It was all made belonging.

In that belonging, the sharp edges of anxiety softened. My tightness melted into some spaciousness. The crisp air around me was allowed to expand my lungs a bit more.

Letting it all belong didn’t make any of it “right.” It made it move.

Letting us be fluid

This practice didn’t only shift how I met myself. It softened how I met others.

When I let my own experience belong, I stopped needing anyone else to be different. Even as a facilitator, I could witness people’s discomfort without needing to fix it or take it away. I could let them be contradictory, complex, beautifully human. I could let them move at their own pace. And I could be an ally, not a savior.

One rainy afternoon, someone in the circle shared that they felt disconnected from the group due to her divergent needs for space. Held by the team, we all took deep breaths and let her experience breathe. Without rushing in to validate or soothe, we invited hands to raise in silence to show resonance about feeling like they too had divergent needs. We didn’t fix anything, we affirmed belonging by reflecting solidarity. She softened, we softened, and the disconnection found another shape.

In that space of relational allowance, something gentle and mysterious rippled through the group; trust, ease, play, and soft storms of transformation.

Macro belonging

Still, a harder question lingered:

If it all belongs, does everything belong?
Does genocide belong?
Does environmental collapse belong?
Does the abhorrent cruelty of empire belong?

I’ve wrestled with this tension. To say “it all belongs” can sound like spiritual bypass, avoidance of moral outrage. But in Tara Brach’s teachings, belonging isn’t agreement. It’s acknowledgment. Acknowledgement that something is here and apart of the big, bewildering tapestry of now. That it belongs simply because it is. To let something belong, even something catastrophic, is to stop outcasting it from my awareness.

In the microcosm of my personal and interpersonal worlds, exiling my and our experiences and feelings mostly causes more disconnection and suffering. Outcasting myself and others stifles the transformation that loving recognition allows.

So why would it be different in the macrocosm? What if even at a global scale, transformation begins not with rejection, but with radical acknowledgment?

I think of community organizers who refuse to outcast even those complicit in harm; who invite police officers to restorative justice circles or corporate leaders into climate grief rituals. Not to absolve, but to engage. To belong the perpetrator back into accountability. It’s risky, uncomfortable, imperfect work…but it’s the kind of work that paves way for exceptional transformation.

The work that reconnects

During one of the Jam’s activities, we practiced Joanna Macy’s “Seventh Generation” from the Work That Reconnects: a dialogue with an ancestor seven generations in the future. The exercise invited two daring assumptions:

1. There will be humans living on Earth two hundred years from now.

2. Those future ones will carry a cultural memory of this moment through story, art, or ritual; and they will be living in life-sustaining communities.

When I feel like there’s no end in sight of the violence, when global change feels so terribly far away, I find myself bracing and numbing just to keep going.

But looking into the eyes of my fellow artivist as a future ancestor before me, I felt an unexpected sense of containment to the chaos…like a faint light at the end of a long tunnel. This containment gave me some safety to feel more. The exercise’s script spoke through him, communicating to me across generations:

“They say that in your time, a few people are richer than the richest ancient kings, while billions go without food, shelter, or clean water. They tell us that in your time, bombs are made that can destroy entire cities. They tell us that whole species of animals and plants are going extinct...”

Contained with these truths, I broke open. Tears came fast. Tears for everything I rush past in daily life in order to show up, meet deadlines, and function. Grief poured through me like rain over stone. And in that flood, I felt relief…relief that I could still feel for the world.

As I welcomed that grief for the very real devastation pulsing through my and our collective body on earth, something was shifting. I imagined my tears pooling into a stone bowl, a cenoté carved by time. I saw myself swimming in it, pink polka-dotted floaties on my arms, letting the grief become a freshwater pool.

In that freshwater, I wasn’t drowning. I was being held.
And when I feel held, I become capable again: alive, sensitive, resilient, creative.

Alchemical belonging

“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

When I stop outcasting parts of myself, my needs and feelings, I free up energy. There’s something alchemical that happens when I stop fighting reality.

Outcasting hardens my heart.
When I outcast my own sadness, it becomes shame and denial.
When I outcast another’s experience, it becomes judgement and disconnection.
When I outcast the world’s pain, it becomes numbness and despair.

And even as I know none of it effects the change needed, the hardening, the shame, the judgment, the numbness can also belong. Through belonging, I build intimacy with them. I see them more clearly for what they are. And held in that clear seeing, they alchemize.

Just as the parts of me I’ve outcast seek recognition, so too do our collective wounds. When I exile the sorrow, trauma, destruction, greed, domination that’s here…they don’t vanish. They combust and spread like wildfire.

But when I say: this too, belongs, I become the village that embraces what is. Not in complacency or agreement, but through radical welcoming. Belonging doesn’t mean passivity. It means holding presence enough to participate in deeper transformation.

And in that space of intimate and radical inclusion, what alchemy is possible?

Resistance to reverence

To make art in times like these is to hold paradox, to bring curiosity to what terrifies us, to transmute fear into perspective. Art doesn’t deny pain…it belongs it, so we can meet reality without collapsing under its weight.

I love the below clip of Trevor Noah talking about how he doesn’t judge any of the comics who went to Saudi Arabia’s recent comedy festival despite Saudi’s politics (also because here he is doing comedy in another oppressive country, the “US”). He talks about how comedy’s job has always been to speak to what’s unspeakable; to find the funny in everything, even death. He noted Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator—a satire of Hitler. By laughing at the tyrant, people became less afraid of him. The art of humor turned the unapproachable into something human, foolish even. It was a way of letting even the unbearable belong; not by condoning it, but by stripping fear of it.

When I allow all the experiences of humanness to belong, I become more available to the current of life itself. I create freshwater pools of life-giving play. I become more intimate with the mystery that’s always trying to move through me, and us.

I’m learning how this is foundational to activism.

Because maybe transformation doesn’t just happen through striving to fix ourselves, one another and the world; but through the radical, reverent act of letting it all, in all its breath-taking beauty and breaking, belong first.

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Longing arrives like an overheated body clinging to me in the nighttime. It shows up in the micro and the macro; from when my text is left long unread by a lover, to when our global prayers and demands for humanity to stop destroying itself keep landing on toxic soil. Sometimes the longing is subtle and private, sometimes it burns like wildfire.

For most of my life, I met my longing with more chasing, achieving, proving, hyper-thinking, story-making, over-planning, numbing, controlling. I’ve been tediously on the gerbil wheel of trying-to-make-the-ache-go-away.

Though over these last couple years and especially lately, I’ve been forced to learn a way that both Rumi and Tara Brach (and so many wise others) point toward in their own languages: meeting the ache with compassion.

Spooning the ache

In Rumi’s poem The Guest House, he writes:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival…
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

Longing is one of those guests…sucking the air out of the room, inconvenient, yet holy. When the ache arises, often many times in a day, I’ve called in Tara Brach’s RAIN practice. Recognize what is happening. Allow the experience to be just as it is. Welcome longing in, sit beside it, breathe into it. Let it have permission to exist. Investigate with curiosity and care. “Where in my body are you?” “how do you want me to express you?” Then Nurture what’s there with loving action, if it’s called for.

In the midst of so much collapse and fear, I find myself more committed to my relationships—the small ecosystems where love, rupture, and repair mirror the world’s larger work. As I deepen intimacy with the beautiful and complex people in my life, I keep meeting the dark corners of my own “insecure attachment.”

The anxiety, the avoidance, the hot and cold waves of feelings, and the frequent contracting and blooming of my nervous system leave me so achy and distracted sometimes. I can be overtaken by fear of loss, overwhelm, enmeshment, betrayal, etc. And I’ve often reacted to the fear (and the longing for both connection and autonomy) by running the gerbil wheel.

So I write this piece to remember this lesson, to integrate it even (and maybe remind you too, dear reader, if you need it)…

The ache is a divine nudge for me to bring compassionate, embracing hands back to myself. It’s a bid for secure connection within myself. When I give it the care is deserves, it becomes a portal to devotion, creativity and magnetic erotic energy.

As I bring this care to my longing, I am called to the forest to water the soil with my tears, to create new art in collaboration with those around me, to see parts of myself and humanity that were waiting patiently this whole time. The perceived objects of my longing fade into soft focus, my stories loosen, and what remains is energy…alive and tender. It becomes less about someone or something “out there” and more about the capacity within myself to hold the love.

This is the alchemy: to love the ache itself. Not to focus on what it obsesses over, but to see what its presence is here to teach. The ache shows me where I still believe I am separate from myself, from love, from belonging and God.

Perhaps spooning the ache, each and every time, is fostering “secure” love.

Compassion as alchemy

To be compassionate (to be with the burn of the ache) is to become the hearth. To meet the ache of longing with warmth is to place my hand on my heart every time and whisper, “Hi my love, you belong here.”

Every moment I turn toward longing instead of chasing its object, the energy transforms like lead into gold. My heart feels roomier, breath steadier, mind more present, the world even a little less heavy.

“Animals never interfere with the wildness of the earth. They attune themselves to the longing of the earth and move within it as if it were a home rhythm.”

John O’Donohue

Maybe this is how personal practice becomes collective medicine: the way we meet our own ache shapes how we meet the world’s. When we can stay with the ache of separation without collapsing or fleeing or chasing, we become capable of holding the great aches for justice, peace, and planetary healing…perhaps with a lot more wild love and a little less despair.

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The other night at a family party, I spent time with a sixteen-year-old girl visiting from India. Within minutes of meeting me, she said something I’ve heard many times before: “You seem like you have it all together.”

For a long time, this statement felt flattering—like I’m a puzzle with every piece clicked into place, ready to be framed and put on the wall. It affirmed my competence and worthiness. If people believed I had it together, I could be safe and admired…I could belong.

But lately, those words land differently. They don’t feel like “love” anymore. They feel like distance, projection, assumption. When someone says I have it all together, I feel isolated, unseen, misunderstood, even angry.

Because the truth is, I don’t (no duh).

My puzzle actually feels like it has infinite pieces strewn all over the floor. Sometimes I have no idea where anything goes. Sometimes I jam them into the wrong spot and pretend it works. And only sometimes, often unexpectedly, a section does come out like a beautiful mosaic.

I’m organized, yes. I’m creative, dependable, even an effective leader at times. AND I’m insecure. Sensitive. An addict. Prone to spirals of anxiety, rumination and limerence. A Virgo with a dominating inner critic, a Pisces that can drown in her feelings, a Libra who can’t decide what to wear many mornings. Those parts are just as real as the intentional curation people glimpse online or in how I eventually swag myself up (because as Libra, beauty is also a core value for me :).

That “all together” vibe people pick up on? It’s not an accident. My new reaction to it lately has forced me to look more closely at my strategies for belonging. Somewhere inside me, I’ve been creating and curating that vibe. There was a time when I did want people to see me as perfect, beautiful, confident. And now, it’s occurring to me as a layer of perfectionism. I’ve been allowing perfectionism to quietly choreograph my “cool girl” movements. It’s been an effective survival strategy, and a freaking exhausting one.

Dear reader, maybe you know this type of exhaustion? It shows up when I drive home from speaking publicly and then replaying every moment I wasn’t clear enough, sharp enough, present enough. It shows up when I go to a social event, stay only twenty minutes, and then berate myself for not saying goodbye to every friend. It shows up when I cancel plans, or when I stay home alone to rest.

With all the inner critic work I’ve done personally and in community with clients and beyond, I hadn’t necessarily seen my inner critic as furthering a perfectionistic agenda. But it’s been a strange blessing to look at this old compliment, you have it all together, through the lens of perfectionism. I can see deeper tendrils of perfectionistic control winding through my choices, my standards for myself, and my standards for my relationships! Rather than getting caught up in the “you could’ve said this, it didn’t go well, why didn’t you do this?” narratives, I’ve been noticing it more, “ohhhh, it’s you perfectionism. I see you. You are not me.” And in this seeing, something loosens.

Perfectionism isn’t only personal—it’s political

The same internal voice that tells me I must be perfect is the one that can silence me in moments when my voice and presence are most needed. Perfectionism makes us hesitate before speaking, before showing up, before trying something we’ve never done. It whispers: you’re not ready yet, not smart enough, not the right person. But the work of tending to a fractured, burning world asks us to move anyway, to risk imperfection, to be seen in our incompleteness.

In the midst of climate collapse, fascism, surveillance, and so much violence, waiting until or pretending like we “have it all together” is a luxury and mask we can’t afford. The movements that change the world are made of humans who stutter through speeches, forget their talking points, cry mid-meeting, or contradict themselves one week to the next. They’re made of people who are learning as they go. What makes them powerful isn’t polish but presence and persistence.

I’m learning to let go of the tedious choreography of perfectionism for my sanity, and in solidarity with what it means to be human. To remember that we don’t need to be pristine to be worthy and we don’t need to be “ready” to be responsible. Perhaps what we need is to keep showing up as our flawed, inconsistent, human selves. I write this as a commitment to allowing myself to be seen even in my shaky, messy, and beautiful puzzle with missing pieces and edges that don’t quite align.

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Since the title arrived as a divine download in February, I’ve been reflecting on what it means and why it requires my stewardship. My logical brain still struggles with “compassion,” “fascism,” and “coloring” on the same page. Some people have found it off-putting, too casual, misused, intense, divisive. I understand that.

And yet, I say fascism not to sensationalize or weaponize, but to name real patterns we’re living through: authoritarian control, systemic censorship, cultural erasure, genocide, dehumanization, so much fear. Fascism is defined differently among scholars and activists, but most point to recurring markers:

• Authoritarian leaders who consolidate power

• Suppression of dissent—journalists, academics, activists under attack

• Targeting of vulnerable groups as “enemies” or scapegoats

• Nationalist or ethnocentric ideologies that glorify a mythic past

• Control of media, education, religion to enforce conformity

• Violence or threats of violence used to maintain order

Some argue we’re living in an era of fascist tendencies or neo-fascist movements, even if it doesn’t look identical to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany. Others prefer words like “authoritarianism” or “collapse” (which admittedly, would’ve made a better alliteration).

Ultimately, I am an artist who listens to her Muse. And I had to do justice to the title that I was given.

Fascism and Compassion

A surprise pairing. And a necessary one.

Because we need both: the courage to call things what they are, and the practices that help us stay human in the midst of them. That’s why this coloring book makes honoring grief, self-kindness, and co-regulation living practices.

Already, coloring circles in Chicago, Denver, the Bay Area, and beyond have gathered around its pages. At the most recent circle in Berkeley, we wove in Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on inter-being, a prominent theme in the book. We colored and contemplated his reminder that we are deeply interconnected, never alone, always impacting and being impacted by one another—from humans to birds. These connective truths are exactly what fascist systems try to strip away.

Coloring as resistance

The ancestors who lived through fascist histories resisted with marches and movements, and with art, ritual, and love.

This book carries forward that lineage. Coloring may seem simple, even unconcerned. But coloring is an act of reclaiming presence, slowing down, and re-humanizing ourselves in a time when dehumanizing systems are horrendously dominant. In that way, coloring itself becomes a quiet form of resistance…choosing tenderness while society demands callousness. Coloring in community asserts that we are not allowing fascism to disarm us from our connection and creativity.

Whether or not you agree with the word fascism, perhaps we can agree that we’re living in times of deep polarization, fear, and control. It’s not the naming of the thing that creates division, but the thing itself.

Words aside, a purpose of this coloring book, and the gatherings sparked by it, is to hold both truths: that things are dire, and that we still have the power to respond with compassion, creativity and collective care.

And as for my gumline, I’m definitely going to oil-pull more—another small, ancient practice for the times. 🤷

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A Black man in his 40s came on board with a bike. His loud voice filled the train as soon as he entered. As he tethered his bike, his attention fixated on a man sitting nearby with what looked like his wife and adult daughter. He began yelling at the man, pointing his finger and sharp words at him. The family stayed still, heads turned away, eyes averted, as if refusing to feed a fire. But the energy in the car tightened.

Then pretty swiftly, a tall brown woman stepped forward. She didn’t escalate, didn’t ignore. She simply stood between the family and the man. I heard her ask the family, “Are you okay?” Then she turned to the man with the bike, offering a small nod and a light smile. They exchanged a few words, maybe she asked him the same question, I couldn’t hear. His tone softened, though his fixation lingered.

When the man locked up his bike, he thanked the brown woman for her time and he moved to sit down a few rows away. She then sat in the 4th seat next to the family. A thread of dignity was being held, invisible but tangible.

A few minutes later, he called across the car to her: “You’re really beautiful. What’s your ethnicity?”

She shifted one of headphones to hear him more clearly, she smiled with slight awkwardness and answered him softly, “I’m Indian, Punjabi.”

He lit up and said, “I got something for you. Ariana Grande might be part Indian—listen to this with your soul.” He set his Bluetooth speaker down in front of her, One Last Time played through the car. The woman nodded slightly to the beat with one ear still open, her fingers tapping in her lap.

I noticed the daughter of the family began to cry. Her mother’s hand rubbed her arm with the back of her palm—a restrained gesture of comfort. Their fear was palpable. I noticed my own judgment here, projecting “white fragility” onto the adult daughter, and then when I realized how potentially ill-informed my judgment was, I was curious about what her tears were about. I made up a story that she wished she was as brave as the Punjabi woman. Maybe I wished I was as brave as the Punjabi woman.

The Black man eventually got a phone call and exclaimed, “I’m getting a phone call, in the most important time of the day!” He spoke to a woman on speakerphone, eventually quieting down in his speech. When he got off the phone, he seemed to be in his own world, swinging from the overhead handrails like a child.

Before he got off at the West Oakland stop, he yelled, “I love y’all. I don’t even know you but I love you, more than you love yourself.” When he stepped off, the Punjabi woman slid her headphones back on, a soft smile lingered on her face.

What stayed with me was not the tension, but the intervention. She didn’t do what everyone else in the traincar did—razor-focusing on their phones, ears blocked, acting like nothing was happening, like a creepy Black Mirror episode. She didn’t silence him or try to control him either. She simply acknowledged him, offered presence, and checked in with those around her. She held both the family’s fear and the man’s humanity. And he softened, because someone saw him.

I noticed my own role also. I didn’t step forward. I also didn’t look away. I kept my eyes and ears open, I let him know I saw him too. And when she glanced at me, I met her gaze as if to say: I see you, sis. I’m here. Perhaps that too was a form of intervention—refusing to turn away, refusing to collapse into avoidance or ignor-ance.

On the train today, I saw the impact of subtle presence, witnessing, and asking the right question at the right time. I saw that collective care sometimes looks like standing between a family and a stranger’s misguided emotion with a question as simple as, “are you okay?” Sometimes it looks like eye contact. Sometimes it looks like choosing not to turn away from someone’s pain, even when it comes with some chaos.

This beautiful Punjabi woman showed me that compassionate intervention can be about attention…about remembering that people often want, more than anything, to be seen and heard. And that our presence, however small, can shift the air in the room.

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All my best writing in this publication is free for you, though here are some ways to continue receiving and giving to the sustainability of this work:

• Share this publication with people who could benefit

• Get a poster to adorn your space with affirming reminders

• Get a book on abundance mentality, playful devotion, or compassion

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

• Join The River, a membership for creative ever~flow with global changemakers

• Attend a workshop series to alchemize the inner critic and cultivate your creativity

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The other day in a session with a client (let’s call her Shreya), I witnessed something I’ve been fortunate to witness many times.

Shreya’s shoulders softened as she exhaled a long, gentle sigh. Her cheekbones loosened, her mouth relaxed and her brow smoothed. A realization landed like a sparkle in her eye about her growth in the past few months. She looked at me and said:

“I feel safe with myself.”

Shreya had spent years numbing with substances like pot and even anti-depressants, chasing achievements, over-working, and people-pleasing until she was utterly burned out.

Now, months into sobriety and also unemployment, she was more accepting of herself than ever. She was safe enough with herself to feel deep sadness and unexpected joy in the same afternoon. Safe enough to trust she could advocate for herself and meet her needs. Safe enough even to dream of a life she longs to create.

For Shreya, and for me, being safe with self means being willing to feel our full eroticism of our human feelings—knowing that we have capacity for it all. It means leaning into the mystery and melodies of our hearts. It’s trusting ourselves in the way Linda and Charlie Bloom describe:

“Self-trust is not trusting yourself to know all the answers, nor is it believing that you will always do the right things. It’s having the conviction that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.”

Whether or not the world is safe, being safe with ourselves means knowing that no matter what happens, we won’t abandon ourselves.

When the world is unsafe

There was a time when feeling lonely was the most painful thing for me. I avoided it at all costs. Dodging feelings of loneliness like the plague had me getting high whenever I was alone or fantasizing about people and situations that brought me further from reality.

Now, I’m in active practice of being with loneliness and longing; even seeing it as an opportunity, a portal. When I’m having a hard time transitioning into the quiet space of solitude after a vibrantly social and fun day, I play a voice note that I recorded for myself called “I get to be with me now ❤️.” Here’s a snippet of it:

When we’ve been through repeated harm and trauma, the sensations and emotions reverberating through our own bodies can feel like a threat. It obviously also doesn’t help that we’re enmeshed with socio-systemic conditioning that has us looking outward for safety in a job title, a partner, a number of followers, the latest certificate. I am often left with an inevitable emptiness chasing this type of safety, because it’s a moving target, never quite enough, and always tied to performance.

Loving community mirrors

During my first Arts For Social Change Jam in 2016, my friend and facilitator, Austin, held my hand as I cried. I didn’t have words or a justifiable reason for his attention. I had nothing to give besides my sadness. And still, he just held me with a gentle gaze and said, “I’m here, there’s space for you.” He didn’t try to fix my feelings or even understand why they were present. No questions, no tips or suggestions, just presence. I went through all the unsafe inner critic thoughts, “I’m wasting his time. I’m taking up space I don’t deserve. What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t feel this way. I’m being pathetic, he probably thinks I’m so lame. Can I be done with this? This is so awkward.” And still, his presence was a safe ground that helped me eventually move through it, wipe my tears, hug it out, and flow on into a delicious shared meal.

Even though this was almost 10 years ago, I still think about it because it was such a memorable time that someone so clearly reflected safe presence back to me when I felt so unsafe within myself. As I’ve become that safe presence with others who go through the rolodex of those unsafe inner critic thoughts, I am reminded of myself back then and the alchemical ripples of loving community through time.

Self-safety is self-responsibility, but we don’t respond in isolation. We become more of ourselves in the presence of people who see us clearly and treat our wholeness as welcome. Loving community mirrors back the parts we’ve hidden, reminding us they belong. And over time, we learn to internalize that mirror.

Cultivating stable ground

Self-safety is not a switch we flip, it’s a soil we feed over time. A few ways I’ve seen it grow in myself and in the people I work with is by:

• Naming our feelings in real time. “I’m feeling anxious.” “I’m feeling left out.” “I’m feeling ecstatic.” Naming interrupts the old reflex to ignore, minimize, or numb

• Bringing our bodies into it. Playing our hands where we feel emotion or sensation— chest, throat, belly — and breathing into that space lets our nervous systems register that we can stay present

• Keeping small promises to ourselves. Showing ourselves we are trustworthy in daily ways can mean going to bed when we said we would, drinking water when we’re thirsty, stepping away from draining conversations

• Welcoming the “unacceptable” parts. Give our needy, petty, jealous, or awkward selves a literal seat next to us and asking what they need

• Surrounding ourselves with loving community. Prioritizing spaces of embodiment that allow our feelings without fixing or correcting them, that normalize our various parts without judgment (and with self-accountability), with friends, peers, healers or the like

Dear reader, if you knew you could be with safe with yourself no matter what, what would be possible?

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• Share this publication with people who could benefit

• Get a poster to adorn your space with affirming reminders

• Get a book on abundance mentality, playful devotion, or compassion

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

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• Attend a workshop series to alchemize the inner critic and cultivate your creativity

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The other day, a mirror that was hanging on my closet door fell and shattered all over the floor. Shards of reflective glass scattered everywhere, fragments of my face reflected back as I stood above them.

At the time, I was on the phone having a first conversation with someone I had met on Hinge. I told him what had happened.

He offered a quick interpretation, "could it be that a part of you has shattered? An identity that’s completed its cycle and no longer serves you?"

I appreciated the perspective.

It was, honestly, the most resonant thing he had said on the call. Up until then, I perceived him to be quite aloof and sanctimonious.

Earlier in the conversation, I had shared that I was feeling a bit burnt out with the dating apps—the disposability, the ghosting, the unreliable communication. In response, he said he approached it all with no expectations. He receives what the universe gives and makes do with what he gets, so he never feels disappointed. He said, “some people set themselves up for disappointment by expecting specific things from the app.” Was he talking about me? I wondered. He went on to say that whether a connection turns out to be romantic, platonic, or nothing at all, he’s “great either way” because he doesn’t take it too seriously.

That might be an admirable approach—even aspirational. But as his first response to my vulnerability, I felt it to be disconnecting (I really want to say dismissive, but I’m actively trying to use non-violent communication here and take responsibility for my own feelings :P).

I could just see a younger version of myself being very attracted to his nonchalance. She would’ve thought, Wow, I want to be that chill, detached, and “in the flow.”

But I’ve been learning that sometimes detachment is just another costume for avoidance. Avoiding desire. Avoiding the courage it takes to name what you want. Avoiding the rawness, eroticism and aliveness that come with fully feeling. Is it easier to be “great either way” when we’re not touching into the fullness of our hearts?

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During a morning meditation, the words, “cultivating compassion in times of fascism” landed with force…like an urgent assignment from the creative muses and collective ancestors. With it came a whole lot of energy potential that moved me to work on 50+ illustrations daily for the next 2 months.

In the Springtime that followed, the draft was fortified by many beloveds and community groups. Various people’s perspectives helped refine how the images felt in the body, how clear the affirmations landed, and how inclusive the faces and pages were. This project has been a collective labor of love.

On August 15, I’ll be releasing an adult coloring book with its divinely-given title “Cultivating Compassion in Times of Fascism” and community-loved pages 💐

Learn more about the book at compassioncoloringbook.com 💖

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I tend to giggle every time I speak the title because my inner critic still keeps saying, “WTF are we coloring for when the world is on fire?!”

And yet…this book came from a sacred spark with a lot of energy, and it’s already been resonating and rippling. It’s also been shaped by my years of immersion in compassion research, nervous system literacy, and healing justice facilitation.

Creating visual art has long supported me in soothing my nervous system and metabolizing emotions. Coloring has been a bridge—between creativity and regulation, joy and grounding, witnessing what is and imagining new ways of being.

When I created my first coloring book on “Cultivating Abundance Mentality” during the pandemic, it helped me access focus, purpose and hope in the quarantine of fear, scarcity and uncertainty. The book was unexpectedly embraced by educators, activists, parents and creative changemakers around the world. It reminded me that color has always been a site of resistance. Think of queerness. Street murals. Ancestral dyeing traditions. We’ve long used pigment and pattern to make meaning, mark time, and insist that we are here and vibrantly alive!

While coloring seems small, small things matter like fractals in a whole.

Coloring slows us down. Coloring soothes our amygdalas, the primal part of our brains associated with stress and fear. It shifts our nervous systems into rest and digest where our bodies can heal, calm, and repair.

Coloring brings us into our hands, into using our fine motor skills, into the little joys of choosing colors and seeing the page transform with our attention. Rhythmic repetitive movement like coloring helps discharge energy and reconnect to safety.

Coloring can put us in a “flow state” where we are utterly present—and not ruminating or doomscrolling or overwhelmed with all the things. Our flow states foster our emotional regulation, decreases our stress hormones like cortisol, and clarifies our minds toward creativity and attentiveness—essentials for world-building and liberation.

Coloring offers a low-pressure, nonverbal creative practice that revives our inner worlds and joy without requiring “artistic skill.” Coloring invites play, messiness, wonder—things fascism tries to crush.

Coloring as a catalyst

Yes, this book is about coloring. But it’s also about feeling, resting, remembering. Each page is a portal to tenderness, truth and collective aliveness.

I see this book as a catalyst for gathering, nurturing our nervous systems together through coloring, reflecting, witnessing and sharing on themes like kindness, grief, rage, interdependence, hope and more. I love how deeply aligned this is with healing justice, mutual care, and sustainable activism.

We’re organizing coloring parties this year in various places! We have coloring parties coming up in Denver and Berkeley in September, hosted by beloved community members.

May we allow these creative practices and rituals to be worthy companions in all that we’re doing for justice, healing, and liberation. May this offering bring us all moments of peace, connection and catharsis. May it remind us of our softness and our strength in times that can make our hearts so callused and weary.

When we make time for beauty, we refuse to be swallowed by despair. In an era of urgency, domination, hyper-activity, and disconnection, coloring on purpose is a radical act. When we nurture our imagination, we’re feeding the soil of a different future.

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Relevant gatherings and resources:

All my best writing in this publication is free for you, though here are some ways to continue receiving and giving to the sustainability of this work:

• Share this publication with people who could benefit

• Get a poster to adorn your space with affirming reminders

• Get a book on abundance mentality, playful devotion, or compassion

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

• Join The River, a membership for creative ever~flow with global changemakers

• Attend a workshop series to alchemize the inner critic and cultivate your creativity

Thank you 💚

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Share Chetna Unfolding

• Share this publication with people who could benefit

• Get a poster to adorn your space with affirming reminders

• Get a book on abundance mentality, playful devotion, or compassion

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

• Join The River, a membership for creative ever~flow with global changemakers

• Attend a workshop series to alchemize the inner critic and cultivate your creativity

Thank you 💚

Subscribe now

Rose as teacher

I was on a “diet” with rose medicine recently. This entailed sitting with her and listening, taking her in with my physical and energetic senses, letting her scent adorn my neck and her buds boil in my morning chai (also fasting from processed foods and screen-time between 9pm and 9am).

In sitting with rose, I was also tending to something deeper—my creative life force, my erotic vitality, and the politics of feeling fully in a time that urges numbness. Rose has been teaching me about eroticism, beauty, and the duality of soft receptivity with sharp discernment. This is the first of at least two essays drawn from my time with rose; the next will explore how she teaches soft receptivity with sharp discernment. But this one is about feeling.

Petals on my lips
like a sweet lover’s kiss
thumb on her folds
she opens with my caress
I smell her, absorb her into me
for moments we become one.
Yet the future lies beside her
in a dried dusty bud.
I hold her with reverence
and with grief—alive
in this moment together
here, for now.

Rose is so erotic.

Rose is erotic in an ecosexual way, absolutely. I mean, it’s no wonder so many cultures around the globe hold the rose as an icon for romance, sexiness, beauty and sensuality. Goddess Lakshmi, a total babe of abundance and beauty, was said to have been made with 108 big and 1008 small rose petals by her love, Vishnu.

But rose medicine is so erotic also in the way Audre Lorde viewed the “erotic”…

“The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”

Rose has been inviting me to feel everything: her softness and her thorn, her blossoming and her decay, her fragrance and her fleetingness. Going to the rose garden everyday during my dieta, I made friends with specific bushes, tracking the movements and lifespans of their flowerings. I felt excitement at how their fragrances shifted each day, and sadness at their wilting. To be with rose in this way felt like communing with a vast spectrum of emotion and sensation.

Lorde talks about the erotic not being reduced to pornographic, but in our ability to feel fully, and to choose from that emotional intelligence. When we allow ourselves to really feel—all of it—we tap into a force that not only fuels our creativity, but also becomes a radical act of reclamation and assertion of aliveness in a world numbed by disconnection. The erotic is the hum of life desiring to express through us, through energy in motion (e-motion).

Feeling is erotic—feeling all the feelings.
The tension of hard emotions can be the catalyst for change.
The joy of pleasurable emotions can be savored and delighted in.
All of it…erotic AF.

Creating from aliveness

Svadisthana, the sacral chakra, is considered the seat of our sensuality, creativity, and our feelings— all deeply intertwined. The element represented in this energy vortex of our bodies is water. And water must flow. When we let emotions flow—the grief, rage, delight, ache—we invite erotic vitality to move through us. This aliveness is creative, even political.

And yet, leaning into creative expression can feel terrifying right now, when the world feels so fragile, fucked up, and overwhelming. What does an artist express at seeing humans being starved to bones in Gaza? When more climate scientists are saying, “it’s too late”? Or when so many young people are having dark, lonely conversations with AI—conversations they keep secret and feel shame around? How or what does one create, despite all of this?!

In a session called Erotics of Creativity last week in The River, we began the session with simple hip circles to music. Engaging the pelvis, we made space for sensation to awaken, for energy to move up, down and all around. As I write this, my hips are moving in circles in my seat and it feels really good.

I asked folks after: when was the last time you felt erotically alive—vicerally and sensorily, and what textures brought you into it? People acknowledged moments of erotic vitality that they had experienced that day or days prior— singing with family in the car, eating a piece of juicy peach, seeing a glass exhibit in a museum, the sound and feeling of hitting a punch mitt in the sweet spot, and more. I realized myself that I was indeed feeling “erotically alive” recently while crying hot tears in grief, sticky snot dripping. Even in grief, rage, resentment, and longing, erotic and creative energy pulses—luring us to stay close, to listen. Despite folks’ differing levels of comfort with both the word, “erotic” and their erotic bodies, what emerged in their reflections was aliveness. The aliveness of our eroticism was all right there, and we were swirling in it.

I often hear clients say, “I don’t have capacity to show up when I’m dealing with so much of my own emotional weight” or “I feel like a mess—why would I want to share any of my art right now?” Of course, tending to ourselves is necessary alongside attempting to care for everyone else. But what would be possible in our creativity if we let ourselves feel everything? Sure, we may not share everything we create (please don’t, let some of it be totally unfiltered and just for you), but what’s it like when we allow ourselves our full spectrum of feeling in the intimacy of our own company?! When we let complete tides of feeling move through us, what kind of world could we create then?! I wonder…

So dear reader, I ask you:

• When was the last time you felt erotically alive—vicerally, emotionally, spiritually?

• What feeling(s) in you needs your non-judgmental presence?

May we make and unmake from a sense of our own aliveness—and find ourselves in gardens of blooming roses: lush, thorny, not performing, not striving. Just opening, in rhythm, in feeling.

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In the dream, I met this woman on a retreat, she was a makeup artist. After the retreat ended, I saw a video on her instagram that she had made. She was dressed in shimmering gold and red, glowing with a kind of royal sensuality. Her swaying movements were slow and ceremonial. Behind her loomed a massive black snake, coiled but alive, its tongue flicking the air near her bare skin. The tension between them was palpably electric and so erotic. The snake was also threatening, trying to dominate her in a way with its teasing strikes. But she didn’t flinch, she was aware and in control of herself.

Then, without warning, her mouth opened, wider than seemed human, and she sank her suddenly revealed fangs into the snake’s neck. That was how the video ended.

In the dream, I was stunned and in awe by the woman’s artistic mastery—her ability to create something that felt so real and visceral, mythic and magical.

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When I journaled about the dream the next morning, I felt pulled to share it with some of my dream-attuned sisters. Their reflections named themes that evolved my processing: feminine resistance, the phallic threat of patriarchy, ouroboric cycles of death and rebirth, shadow work, royalty and sensual power, and the skin-shedding of this Year of the Snake. One friend, , reminded me today that it was Nag Panchami, the Hindu festival dedicated to the worship of serpents! She offered that maybe the snake was the woman’s own sexual Kundalini energy—and the bite was her mastery over it.

Addiction, craving, and cycles

Lately, I’ve been watching myself orbit a familiar ache—the one that flares when I start craving romantic connection the way I once craved cannabis. It’s a hunger that feels both compulsively human and sacredly hollow. I remember the texture of weed withdrawal: how food lost its taste, how silence grew louder, how I missed the ritual more than the substance itself. I see echoes of that now in dating through the high of possibility, the dopamine rush of attention, the way longing itself becomes the drug.

What haunts me most is the cyclical nature of it. Like the Ouroboros, I keep circling the same people—not literally, but archetypically. Lately, they’ve all been emotionally or geographically unavailable: too busy, too far, too consumed by a “season” of their lives filled with work travel, family dynamics, or whatever the fuck else. They say directly or indirectly: I want to see you. and I don’t have capacity. My gut knows nevertheless—this isn’t it. But I’ve been overriding the knowing by telling myself: interesting people are busy. This is just how dating works nowadays. Be chill. Be open. Don’t close off to love.

This dream is not letting me bypass the truth though. The black snake with its flickering tongue, threatening to bite or consume, and the woman, poised and unflinching, biting back—feels like a message from a higher power. A mirror. A reminder that when something seductive but misaligned coils around me, I can choose to bite, to break the spell, to end the cycle of unavailability…within myself.

Erotic power and sovereignty

A friend, , mentioned It Begins With You by Jillian Turecki. In a chapter titled, “lust is not the same thing as love,” she distinguishes the initial spark of chemistry—often unreliable and born from unconscious patterns—from emotional intimacy, which is built slowly in safety and reciprocity. This lands. Because desire, like the snake, can be beautiful and vital…but also addictive. And the goddess in the dream wasn’t swallowed by it.

The dream reminded me of Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic—not as performative or pornographic, but as a source of deep feeling, intuition, and power. The kind of knowing that speaks through the body. To bite the snake, in this sense, is to reclaim my erotic as a compass; not to be ruled by desire, nor to repress it, but to wield it with discernment. To let it guide me toward what is nourishing and sovereign.

There’s a kind of holy violence in that bite—not rage or domination for its own sake, but a refusal to be devoured. A boundary from confusing seduction with truth. In biting back, the goddess isn’t rejecting pleasure; she’s anchoring herself inside it. She’s not turning away from eros. She’s becoming its master.

Meanwhile, the world is on fire

There’s a part of me that feels ridiculous tending to these aches of the heart while the planet burns. Starvation. Wildfires. Floods. Fascism. Extinction. Scientists say it may already be too late. That now is the time to “hunker down.” But what does it mean to hunker down with an open heart? To still long for love in the ruins?

Sometimes I wonder if the craving I feel for intimacy isn’t just personal but planetary. Maybe our bodies know what our minds still resist: that time is short. That connection is sacred. That to love tenderly, and live erotically and consciously, is an act of resistance in a culture of numbness.

Addiction, personal or planetary, is chasing what doesn’t love us back. Capitalism thrives on it: extraction from the earth, from our bodies, from our attention spans. It teaches us to equate hunger with love. To call it freedom when its addiction. To say we’re evolving while we burn through what sustains us.

So biting the snake isn’t just personal liberation—it’s collective medicine. It’s an interruption. A refusal to keep dancing with what pretends to love us while hollowing us out. It’s turning toward a rhythm that is slower, truer, more sensuous, and more sane.

A new skin

Maybe this moment is the after-bite..the shedding…the integration.

Maybe I’m continuing to learn to live without the chase, without the illusion of chemistry as destiny, without the drama of ache mistaken for love. The goddess in the dream didn’t bite the snake in vengeance, she bit to end the spell. To metabolize the hunger and alchemize longing into something more whole, perhaps.

And maybe this dream wasn’t just for me.

In a world unraveling ecologically, politically and spiritually, maybe we’re all being called to bite back. To confront the seductive cycles that drain our life force: the endless scroll, the hyper-productive grind, the hollow hedonistic consumption, the myth of romantic salvation.

But shedding a skin is so uncomfortable. It requires friction, fasting, stillness, solitude. What if that’s exactly what the earth is asking of us the way she did in 2020? To slow, to quiet, and to shed. To compost our illusions and reject the poisons. To return to our animal bodies, our sacred boundaries, and our intuitive knowing.

Maybe that’s a task of our time?—To choose a new skin. Not one shaped by fear, addiction, or domination. But one that remembers how to feel, listen and live while we still can. Fully, sensually, sovereignly and together.

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All my best writing in this publication is free for you, though here are some ways to continue receiving and giving to the sustainability of this work:

• Share this publication with people you love

• Get a book on abundance mentality, playful devotion, or compassion

• Get a poster to adorn your space with compassionate reminders

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

• Join The River, a membership space for creative ever~flow with a global community of changemakers

• Join a workshop series to alchemize the inner critic or cultivate creative somatic alchemy

Thank you 💚

Subscribe now

Share Chetna Unfolding

• Share this publication with people you love

• Get a book on abundance mentality and/or playful devotion

• Get a poster to adorn your space with compassionate reminders

• Schedule a discovery call to work with me 1:1 for your Creative Alchemy™

• Join The River, a membership space for creative ever~flow with a global community of changemakers

Thank you 💚

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I’ve been so inspired lately by friends who wrap their favorite books in brown paper and collage, then bring them to parties as beloved company—shoutout to Devika :). So this past weekend, I cracked open one of my most beloved, dog-eared texts, Eternal Echoes by John O’Donohue, and this passage met me like a balm:

This was the reminder I didn’t know I needed.

Because I’ve been caught up.

Caught in the swirls of summer—its blooming, burning, bursting. Caught in the pleasure and ache of being alive right now: this world on fire, deep grief and buoyant joy braided everywhere. Caught in my own rabbit holes of interpersonal shenanigans and emotional highs.

Even after long days of dancing, laughing, frolicking in vibrant colors and melinating under the social sunshine—I come home and feel...unmoored. Even achy with longing. Longing for more music, more connection…more something. Other times, I’m too tired to be with myself, or the Divine, with utmost care.

The sacred is here. Always. In every golden hour and every heartbreak, every silence and smile. But in the whirlwind, I forget.

So I’m writing this as a reminder. For myself—and maybe for you.

To slow down more on purpose.
To return to the altar of my secret belonging.
To make space for stillness—not as absence, but as a sacred reunion.

Let me remember the felt sense of bowing my head in gratitude—at home, in the forest, by the ocean. Let me recall what it’s like to be fully gathered in prayer—in deep slow divine listening. Let me remember that I don’t have to carry it all, solve it all, do it all. I can lay it down. I can be held.

I’m reading Sovereign Love by Dené Logan, who writes about healthy and wounded feminine and masculine energies as they relate to polarity in relationships. There’s so much more to say about her writing, which I hope to reflect on here in the future but this model helps me see when I need prayer most…

As a self-motivated, independent, compassionate, and intuitive human, I spend a good amount of time in my healthy masculine and feminine. But when I slip into my wounded masculine (needing to fix and control, afraid of failure or rejection, avoidant or withdrawn from love) and my wounded feminine (needy, insecure, projecting emotion onto others or anxious attachment), prayer is what brings me back.

Back to humility.
To peace.
To authenticity.
To deeper connection.

In a world that never stops spinning, prayer is a warm hand on my back, reminding me that I can still be still. That I, too, am an earthen vessel of longing. That beneath the noise, there’s always a deeper be-longing waiting.

So this is a love note to that place.
To the quiet…remembering…in prayer.

I currently have 3 client openings for 1:1 sessions:

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TLDR;

• The push-pull

• Not romance, but addiction

• Withdrawal

• Re-wiring identity

• And you?

In 12-step recovery groups, I’ve often heard: Don’t get into any romantic or sexual relationships within the first year of recovery.

More than ever, I understand why.

The Push-Pull

Recently, I found myself in a situationship with someone who my inner 16-year-old would’ve called “the hottest guy I’ve ever dated.” Not only that, he was sweet, he wanted to meet my needs and give me joy through home-made meals, driving hours to see me, and a dreamy freaking smile. A gentleman perhaps…but one who was hella avoidant—dodging any real conversations about his own needs, fears, or emotional availability.

Our dynamic was also textbook push-pull: he’d retreat when I leaned in, and show up enthusiastically when I stepped back. More importantly, I became (even more) avoidant with him; it began to feel wrong and imbalanced to open my heart and be transparent with my feelings and desires.

It was a month and a half of chronos time—what felt like a year in kairos—my nervous system was on a wild rollercoaster with this avoidant baddie. I was wrecked. And honestly, I still am a bit.

So, I’m writing about it here to keep alchemizing these feels into lessons… 🥴❤️‍🔥

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TLDR;

• My recent limerent crush

• What is limerence?

• Letting go of fantasy cycles

• Recovery is an ever-unfolding path

• Authentic imperfect connection

• Fantasy versus radical imagination

• Inquiries for you, dear reader

Not long ago, I spent weeks rehearsing imagined dialogues, dissecting text messages, and losing sleep over scenarios that existed primarily in my brain—all for a man who did little more than smile at me a few times across a dance floor.

My projections lifted him up like the sun as I rotated around fantasies of him being an amazing communicator, a loving provider, a king archetype…simply based on how he spoke into a mic or glanced at me a few times.

I wasn't in love, not even close. I was in limerence.

When I told friends I had a limerent crush, they got giddy, expecting some juicy rom-commy story. But limerence isn’t a type of giggly crush that makes me blush. Limerence makes me lose touch with reality. A crush gives me butterflies, limerence gives me insomnia.

What is limerence?

Limerence can turn a couple looks into a full-blown indie romance—except none of it is actually happening. It’s a psychological state where obsessive attraction, intrusive thoughts, and emotional dependency swirl together in delusion. If a crush is a spicy bachata dance between two eye-gazing partners, limerence is an interpretive solo performance on an empty stage, for an audience of one: me.

Limerence often grows out of early neglect or hyper-independence. As a recently immigrated 8-year old, I spent many hours alone in my room with Mariah Carey blaring through my boombox about her cute fantasies of loverboys. Her high notes filled emotional voids in me that my parents—bless them—couldn’t, especially when the depressive struggle for belonging in a strange new land away from community was real, and long. I became a master of soothing myself out of loneliness through music and make-believe. And now, as an adult, I sometimes find myself reaching for the same balm, even though it actually sucks ass.

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