On The Cusp
What the contraction you may be in is actually trying to tell you.
A weird thing has been happening. I’ve been resisting writing.
This is not a small thing. I have always written - for myself, for others, for whatever reason presented itself. I love to write. I love to type. I played Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for fun. I am, as established, a giant dork. 🤓
But since I pulled back from Instagram - from hours a day to less than an hour a week - I’ve also stopped feeling the compulsion to produce, to write, to share cohesive thoughts online. And I’ve been sitting with that. Uncomfortably.
Because here’s what I know about myself: My human design type is Generator. I work best when I have something to respond to, something that lights me up and pulls a full-body yes out of me. Or, a full body no that I can respond to. And lately, very little has done that on the writing front. The podcasts, the books, the notes I keep accumulating - all the things that usually work - and still, nothing is catching. So I’ve avoided even giving myself time to write.
At first I thought something was wrong.
Then I thought: what if this IS the response?
What’s really underneath my resistance - and I’ve had to sit with this - is that writing started to feel less like joy and more like proof that society was demanding. Post at all costs. Show up, show up, show up. There was definitely a level of pressure to get something out! Post at all costs!
Not quite grandstanding, but close enough that I could feel it. Showcasing for sure. And underneath that, if I’m honest: a fear that if I wasn’t seen, I’d be forgotten.
Which is a very old fear. A very female fear.
You’re only worthy if you’re beautiful or busy. My mom is 76 and still brags about how hard she works. That is not a personality quirk. That is conditioning. And I received it, the way we all do - not as a belief we chose, but as the truth we knew.
So I’ve been asking myself: what does it mean that I stepped away from the grind and part of me was relieved, as expected, but also blocked, unispired, not rushing to fill the newfound time with what gives me joy - writing.
And also I was still fighting the voice that says: you should have something out. You should have updated that freebie you designed weeks ago and were so excited about. You should be producing.
I don’t have a clean resolution to offer you here just yet. I’m in the reckoning, not on the other side of it. What I’m sitting with - live, unfinished - is how do I show up, sustain what I’m building, and honor a season of deliberately reduced output, all at once? What does leadership look like when inspiration isn’t arriving on my business’s schedule?
I don’t know yet. But I’m becoming more certain that the contraction I’m in is information in itself. That this isn’t a failure of discipline. That something larger is asking something of me - of us - and the worst thing I could do right now is drown it out with output.
I’ve been sitting with a profound sense that we are on a cusp. And so I find myself in a rebound, a contraction. After six years of showcasing myself, my life, my views, my opinions online, I’m bouncing back. Recovering. Deepening again in my practice.
I am also, like so many people, perplexed and saddened. For my beloved Dubai. For the friends living there. For a world allowing fascism to run rampant in the former global superpower I am from and still live in. And while I am buoyed by the folks who are seeing through the systems and status quo and starting to question everything, I wish more people would hurry up already!
I never expected our systems and governments to be as benign as most people, but am still hit by the level of nefarious greed and plundering and pure evil for the gain of a few. Governments weren’t installed to benefit society - society was organised to benefit the ruling class.
We are at a cusp. The Right Angle Cross of Planning - 400 years of building systems, infrastructure, architecture for expansion - is ending. And we are watching those systems do what systems do when they’ve outlived their purpose: they reveal who they were always built to serve. It was never us. They are uttering their dying gasp and in the death throes, holding on for dear life.
The upcoming cycle - the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix - is about individual awakening. Self-trust. Rising from within precisely when the outer structures can no longer hold us. We are not moving away from community. We are redesigning tribal bargains. But first we have to find ourselves underneath the conditioning that got us here.
And this is where I need to say something about the spiritual community, because I live in Venice-adjacent Santa Monica, which has no shortage of healing spaces. And I am watching those spaces fail this moment.
I drove past a meditation center recently. The sign read: Be present in divine light.
And I felt my whole body reject it. I got mad.
Not because presence is wrong. On the contrary. Mindfulness is essential to living a full life. But because what is being demanded of us - in those rooms, in those spaces - is partition. Leave your rage at the door. Your grief belongs somewhere else. Your outrage about what is happening to actual human beings in the actual world is not welcome here. Come in, light the incense, and we’ll call that healing.
I cannot do it. I won’t.
I am refusing the demand to partition myself. Politics in one room, healing in another, outrage somewhere we’re not supposed to bring it. And the energetic reality that you can feel what a room is actually holding, which means you know when the healing isn’t honest about what it’s healing toward. And you’re done pretending otherwise.
Because here’s what I know: you can feel the energy in a room. You walk into a space, and you know if people are tense or open, grieving or celebrating. Energy is not abstract. It is information.
And if we don’t know whose energy we’re merging with - if we don’t know whether the person on the mat next to us believes that basic human rights are worth protecting - then what are we actually healing toward?
I choose not to stand in spaces that can’t stand against the devaluation of basic human rights, and stand FOR what matters.
That is not a boundary. That is a value. And it is the political and the spiritual fused, which is the only honest version of either.
So this is where I am.
In the quiet. In the contraction. In the evolution - because that’s what this is, not a pivot, not a rebrand - an evolution being asked of all of us by these specific times. Learning to trust my own signal when the noise is deafening. Allowing this season to be what it is without forcing output to prove that I’m still here, still leading, still lit up.
I am. Just not loudly right now.
Instead, stepping away from productivity metrics and allowing the impact of this knowing to settle before setting out on a new rhythm that fuels my creativity, my impact work, and my outreach.
^^ Mom and me in Bali… doing the opposite of working hard.