Echos from the Circle

(Relationships Are for Relating) I’ve been talking with a few friends this past week about dating, both the concept and the word. It started when I mentioned I was meeting up with someone for a drink to get to know him. “Is it a date?” It’s a bid for connection, I said. Sure, it’s a date. “Yeah, but is it a date that leads to dating? Is it a romantic date?” It’s a date to connect with someone in the present moment. If it feels good, we’ll do it again. Will that be romantic? W

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve made my transition from one side of the country to the other, as I pruned, purged, and packed my entire life to fit in two relatively small boxes (well, three if you count the car, which carried the most important part of my life: me, and my best friend), traveling through eleven states, living out of two suitcases, one of which was packed much more appropriately than the other, staying in hotels and ultimately an Airbnb (which would become my

What does it mean to feel light? What does it mean to feel heavy? That was the question circle sat with this week — the second of three guideposts I've been building out slowly, one Monday at a time. Last week was open-heartedness. This week, light-heartedness. When I have a topic in mind, I like to open circle with a meditation that gently orients us there before we start talking. Mostly that means bringing awareness to the body — grounding, arriving, noticing rather than in

Twenty-some years ago, I was introduced to something called a heart circle — a practice, a held space, where you get to speak about your own experience, the joy and the sorrow, and be witnessed in a way that lets your heart actually open, both as speaker and as listener. No one is there to comment, fix, or offer advice. You just speak — and there's a quiet power in that, in knowing you're safe, that no one's going to throw their spin on what you just shared. That was my doorw

The echo from this week's circle rang with positivity. The question that started the ripple was focused on what we want to radiate differently — what we want to recalibrate in our lives for the good of all people. When asked, one participant shared that an influential person in her life carried the maxim, "be overwhelmingly positive!" She has recently decided to try it on for size, writing it on a sticky note and taping it to her computer. On one hand, "be overwhelmingly posi

Coming home isn't arriving somewhere naked and bare. It's arriving at the understanding that you have a choice. This week's circle has us exploring what it means to come home to ourselves. What does it look like to remove the layers of drag and reveal our true selves? Not lying naked and bare — but arriving at an understanding that we have choice. Our freedom lies in the sovereignty to choose the outfits we wear. Or more accurately: how we show up, and the vibration we carry.

What does it actually mean to show up as yourself — without mistaking reactivity for authenticity? Showing up authentically doesn't mean saying whatever comes up the moment it comes up. That's one of the most common misreadings of what it means to be "real" — that authenticity is unfiltered reaction. Telling someone off. Staying in the emotion. Using what we're feeling as ammunition instead of information. There's a real difference between honoring that a reaction is happenin

What are you practicing while you wait? Not “how do I make the waiting stop.” Not “when will this finally resolve.” That was the question I brought to circle this week — and I brought it standing right in the middle of my own version of it. There’s an energy a lot of us have been feeling lately. Several astrologers are pointing at July 21st through 27th, but honestly, it’s felt present for weeks now. Something shifting. Something arriving. Nobody in circle could name exactly

What are you being invited to walk through with a smile on your face and gratitude in your heart? That was the question I brought to circle this week. And I want to be clear about what I'm not asking: I'm not asking you to cover up your pain or paste a smile over your grief. I'm asking something different — whether there's a way to move through all of life, including the hard parts, with a genuine sense of gratitude for what is, and maybe even a thread of joy or contentment r

There is a question that has a way of following us — quiet, persistent, and occasionally ruthless. Am I doing enough? I came home from Sedona carrying two things that don't usually travel together: deep nourishment and fresh grief. The first half of my trip was everything I needed it to be. Waking up to coffee and hugs. Long conversations around a fire watching the night sky for meteors and UAPs. Shared moments of music, art, wisdom, and tenderness — the kind that only happen

I came back from the woods today carrying something I couldn't quite name. Not an idea. Not an insight. Something more like a remembering — the kind that lives in the body before it ever makes it to the mind. I'd been standing at a place where two streams met. Watching them find each other. There were waves, swirls, some turbulence where the currents clashed. But it didn't last long. Because water doesn't argue about where it's going. It just goes. And eventually, it's all on

On always being, always becoming, and the art of conscious play Being upfront — I'm borrowing this phrase from the streets of Philadelphia, where it carries a certain edge. Here, I'm giving it a different life. Fuck around and find out, as I mean it, is an invitation. Be curious. Play. Explore. Collect the data and see how it all fits together. It's the scientific method applied to personal growth — and it might be the most important practice I know. Always Being. Always Beco

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a voice message. He told me he'd written something in his journal — that when he needed to remember what heart energy feels like, what it feels like to be held by genuine warmth, he thought of my hugs. I sat with that for a while. I've been told I give good hugs. Full-body, draw-you-in, hold-you-longer-than-is-strictly-socially-acceptable hugs. More than one energy-aware friend has commented on my heart energy — my landlord mentions it nearly

You're already contributing more than you know. Someone said something in circle recently that stopped me in my tracks. They described feeling more at peace with themselves than they ever had — and then, almost in the same breath, admitted they weren't sure it was enough. The world felt incomprehensible. Surreal, even. And here they were, quieter inside than ever before, wondering if that inner quiet was somehow a failure to show up. I've been sitting with that ever since. Be

I want to share something profoundly impactful and almost silly in its simplicity: do the thing that lights you up. "Of course," you say. "I know that." But are you doing it? Over the weekend, I was in a conversation — one of my other circles — and someone gently redirected the energy. Two of us had been talking about what we didn't want: how hard it is to garden and maintain what's meant to be communal space when you're doing it alone. What was offered was simple: talk about

The Accumulated Story Recently, two of my brothers surprised me. Not dramatically. Not with grand gestures. Just quietly, in the way a door opens that you forgot was even there. One of them brought up psychedelics — not defensively, not performatively, but with genuine curiosity. And another asked me about crystals. My brothers. These are people I've known my whole life. People I thought I had largely figured out. And I realized: I had been carrying a story about who they wer

(Or: How Absurd This All Is, and How Freeing That Is) Last weekend I woke up with a problem. Not a real problem — one of those exquisitely human, entirely self-generated ones. I had two things I wanted to do with my day and I could not, for the life of me, decide between them. On one side: the 3D world calling. Laundry. Dishes. A bathroom that had been patiently waiting. On the other: the 5D world pulling. Meditation. Journaling. The kind of slow, drifting morning where your

Something feels off. You know it. I know it. Most of the people around you know it, even if they can't quite name it or agree on why. America is out of alignment. The planet is out of alignment. The systems and structures that have governed our lives — political, economic, social, institutional — are not failing because they were poorly designed. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do: serve a very small number of people at the expense of everyone else. The foun

There's a version of showing up in the world that looks like presence but isn't. It's performance. It has the right words, the right cadence, maybe even the right intentions — but there's a subtle layer of management underneath it, a quiet effort to appear like we have it together, like we know, like we're in control. Most of us do this without realizing it. One person in our circle this week talked about training new hires at work and how easy it is to drift into that mode —

Start with what you know. The chair beneath you. The coffee going cold on your desk. The phone in your hand. These are physical objects, made of matter — combinations of elements from the periodic table, the basic building blocks of the material world. You learned this in school. It's settled, familiar, unremarkable. Now go one layer deeper. That matter is made of molecules. Those molecules are made of atoms. And atoms, when you look closely enough, are mostly empty space — a