The Alchemist’s Laboratory

Note:

This episode includes emotionally vulnerable reflections on trauma, spiritual disillusionment, and the ongoing process of healing. While not graphic, the tone is raw and candid, including moments of frustration and tenderness. Please listen with care, especially if you are in a sensitive emotional state. As always, take what serves you and leave the rest.

In this tender episode of Rainbow After Dark, I invite you into the heart of my inner process—where emotion, intuition, and discernment meet in real time. I’ll share from the raw edge of my own sensitivity, and speak on what it means to feel deeply in a world that often rewards disconnection. With a nervous system shaped by trauma and a healing path rooted in embodiment and self-trust, we’ll explore the slow, courageous work of emotional alchemy: metabolizing emotion into wisdom without bypassing or self-abandonment.

Together, let’s challenge the polished narratives of mainstream spirituality. I offer a compassionate critique of ideas like “high vs. low vibrational emotions,” affirming instead that all feelings are inherently worthy of presence. To quote myself: “There’s no such thing as a low or high vibrational emotion, okay? I will die on this hill.”

This was recorded in a moment of real-time vulnerability, and The Alchemist’s Laboratory is more than a conversation—it’s a lived example. In a nuanced return to my own intuition, I’ll model how to stay with what’s real, even when it’s messy or uncomfortable.

This is an offering to those who feel deeply, who question spiritual shortcuts, and who are learning—again and again—that their sensitivity is not a flaw but a compass.

Thanks for listening to Rainbow After Dark! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future ones. If something resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts—feel free to leave a comment on YouTube or connect with me on IG @RainbowAfterDark (I don’t use it much, but I exist!).

This podcast is a space for reflection and exploration—it is not a substitute for professional advice. Please take care of yourself and seek support as needed.

More ways to connect coming soon—stay tuned, and thanks for being here.

Transcript

Hello, hello.

If you don’t know, I’m Rainbow, and this is Rainbow After Dark.

And this is the third time I’ve tried to record this episode. Not because I’m trying to make it perfect, but because the first time I screwed up the audio. I was working in a different way than I have done the other episodes—the other episodes in the past—and I, yeah… I ended up screwing up the original audio file and I couldn’t fix it and I wasn’t about to release it the way that I could release it so I recorded it again, and… it was… fine… but it didn’t feel right. 

And while I am done holding myself to some sort of unachievable and, like, unrealistic standard, I have really had to come face to face with my perfectionistic tendencies, especially in recent years.

Because of what I want to talk about in this episode, it felt really important for me to do it in a way that felt right to me.

So, third time’s a charm.

We’re doing this again. If you’re listening in, welcome. It’s good to have you here.

Yeah. Let’s get into it.

So, today, what are we talking about?

I want to talk about alchemy.

Not in the practical sense—you know, turning lead to gold—but more in an emotional sense. 

I wanna talk about emotional alchemy, our intuition, and the philosophy of becoming.

So if that sounds good to you, please stick around.

Let me know your thoughts if you listen to the episode, I would love to hear how this lands for you.

So, what is alchemy?

Alchemy is a transmutation process, right?

It’s taking something and turning it into something else.

It is generally considered, like, you have to have an equivalent exchange, right?

If you’ve seen Fullmetal Alchemist you know they talk about this. It’s a whole fantasy perspective of it, but it still kind of applies here, right?

You have to have something that you want to understand and break down and turn into something else.

So what does that mean for emotional alchemy?And quite simply, it’s utilizing your emotions as fuel. 

However, I feel like the way we get taught to do this—if we get taught to do this at all—is a whole freaking mess.

Emotions are a big thing for me. 

Emotions, in some ways, are everything.

We as humans are emotional. We are our emotions, and that’s not something that people like to think about especially because so many emotions are shamed and demonized. We’re taught to avoid them, to bypass them, to compartmentalize them, to cut ourselves off from our sense of being.

Some people say emotions are energy in motion, and so, if we as human beings are essentially energy in motion, we are emotions. We are our emotions. And that doesn’t meant that you have to wholly identify with being the emotion. Like, you aren’t, you know, just anger or sorrow or whatever it is, right? But those feelings… they catalyze you to propel forward. There is nothing that you would achieve without utilizing the underlying emotions.

Now, the way we do this—energy—emotions are not problems to solve, okay? They’re not something to fix and they are not something to change. I feel like one of the things that we talk about a lot when it comes to emotions is: don’t be, you know, controlled by your emotions, and you can change, and you can control how you feel, blah blah blah blah, and like… okay, I get it.

Some emotions are uncomfortable, but none of them are worthless, none of them are inherently harmful, and the problem is that we’re taught that that’s true. Or we see people who harness emotions in ways that are harmful, that are detrimental. So we learn that. And then we learn that we have to fix our feelings.

But feelings are just feelings. That’s what they are. They are feelings and they are giving you information.

Everything is information.

Feelings are no exception.

Feelings, emotions… they are sacred, okay?

They are important.

They are messengers.

They are wisdom.

They are here to inform you about your present experiences and/or your previous experiences and how your present experience might be reflecting or echoing those previous experiences and what you need to be present with and understand about yourself and those experiences in order to move forward in alignment.

I feel like, especially when it comes to the spiritual communities—spiritual field—there is a lot of demonization of emotions. There’s a lot of bypassing that is encouraged when it comes to emotions, suggesting that, well, if your, you know, natural state is, you know, bliss or whatever then you can choose to not feel suffering and blah blah blah.

Look.

I get it.

I do.

I get that there are certain emotions that are uncomfortable and I feel like part of the reason that we feel so uncomfortable with them is because we don’t know how to be present with them.

There’s no such thing as a low or high vibrational emotion, okay?

I will die on this hill—I will die on this hill.

There’s no such thing.

There is only your wholeness.

Your full spectrum of experience.

And that includes every emotion.

Your anger comes up because it is showing you where your hurt is, what you’re protective of, where you need to set boundaries and make requests of people. It’s important and it loves you.

Your grief shows you what you have loved, what you care about, what is important to you in a different flavor. ‘Cause here’s the thing—you’re gonna hear me repeat a lot of this—emotions are just different flavors of the energy, okay?

They’re different flavors.

They’re different textures.

Different sights and scents or however you wanna put it.

But ultimately, all of them carry a kernel of truth for you about your experience and what is important to you as the person you’re currently being right now—as the person who is inherent to you—who is natural to you.

Even our most rejected emotions, shame and fear—I feel like these are the two that people really, really don’t wanna feel—they are highly rejected. Fear especially.

We are taught—I’ve talked about fear in past episodes—and fear is one where we are often taught to overcome fear, and to fight fear, and fear is the enemy, and all this kind of stuff.

No.

I highly disagree with this in like, a massive way.

Because through my process, this whole entire process of returning to myself, what has done the most good for me—what has helped me more than anything—has been befriending my fear.

Sitting with and being present with y fear.

It doesn’t mean that I have to let it control the actions that I take, the things that I do… it means listening. Stopping. Being present with it.

What do you have to tell me?

Because fear is not your enemy.

Fear is not trying to stop you. 

Fear is the great illuminator.

It shows you what you truly love and care about if you can untangle the web of conditioning and distortion that is held around it.

The same with shame.

Shame teaches us compassion. 

You can’t shame somebody—you can try, okay?

People do this all the time. We as a culture, we try to shame people for things that they do, that we feel are not okay, right? But shame is an inside job—inside job—shame is an inside job, and shame needs to be felt.

Because shame, more than anything, shows you where you are not in alignment with your truth—where you are not in integrity with yourself—where you are incoherent. And it tends to be wrapped up in all sorts of conditioning because there are aspects of our culture that try to promote and instill shame into us about certain behaviors and, you know, certain ways of being.

And it’s not an easy thing to untangle that.

And I am not here to tell you that it is an easy process because all of this—it involves shedding layers and layers and layers of distortion and conditioning about who you think you are, who you thought you were, who you had to become in order to survive.

And I don’t simply mean survival in the way of, you know, you need oxygen and you need food and you need water and that kind of thing; like, the very basic physical survival components. Because while those are extremely important, it goes beyond that. 

We as humans are wired for connection, and so, in order to survive in community with other humans, there are certain roles that we take on in order to keep ourselves safe. 

And we’re not wrong.

We are not wrong for embodying these roles.

However, they will always keep us stuck in boxes.

And if we really want to flourish, if we really want to thrive—we get to figure out how to create better systems not just for ourselves but hopefully as humanity.

You know, ideally, it wouldn’t be this… quite this much of a task for us. We’d be—we’d be taught how to sit with our emotions. We’d be taught how to communicate how we feel and what we need in ways that don’t feel so threatening, that don’t feel so manipulative, that don’t feel misaligned with our integrity and with our fullness.

Being present and embodied is so important, and if you are bypassing and over intellectualizing what you feel, you’re going to stay stuck, and I don’t say this to shame you. I’m not telling you you’re doing it wrong—you’re in process, and that’s important. We can’t transform if we’re suppressing what we need to experience. So emotional sovereignty, emotional embodiment—full embodiment and acceptance of our experiences and the way we feel about those experiences—is key. And acceptance doesn’t mean that you’re okay with it necessarily; it means honoring and acknowledging what is. What is currently occurring in this present moment, or what you have felt about past experiences that might still need to be felt. ‘Cause just ‘cause it happened, you know, 30 years ago, doesn’t mean that it’s gone. It’s gonna live in your body until you feel it and process it. And this is a hard truth that I’ve had to learn. This is not something—this is still—this still can be challenging for me, right? I’m not talking from a place where I’m like oh I’m full—I’m fully—I don’t think that fully healed is a thing, right? As humans we are constantly in process, that is, that is the thing, you know? Even for me right now.

I’m sitting here and I’m talking to essentially myself. I’m talking to myself and if you’re listening to this, talking to you, who is, in some ways… you’re me, and I’m you, right?

We’re connected, we’re part of all of it, and I’m just being here, sitting in the discomfort that I feel about talking about this. Because it feels like I’m breaking the rules. Like, this is something that is really, deeply embedded in my system—that I can’t speak out against the status quo, that I have to do everything perfectly, that I can’t make mistakes. 

Because how can somebody love me if I get it wrong? 

How can I be loved and accepted if I’m not getting it right?

But if there is no way for me to “get it right”, then what does that mean?

That terrifies me.

Like, I’m sitting here and I am almost in tears because that’s scary for me… and I get to sit with that. I get to acknowledge that. 

But it is scary.

And that little part of me—that tender little dewdrop—that has been taught that they need to be a specific way, and they had to contort themselves and compress themselves to be a specific thing, a specific way, a specific role—in order to survive, in order to be loved, in order to be cared about. They’re not wrong.

That is what they’ve been taught through their experiences. And it makes sense for me to feel afraid. 

And that’s okay.

I’m still here.

I’m still talking.

I’m letting this energy flow and acknowledging the depth of it.

That it is something that is scary.

That it is something that’s not easy for me.

This is challenging for me.

And I still wanna do it.

Because I feel like it’s important.

When I stopped trying to fix how I felt—when I stopped trying to change it—that’s when things started to shift. Not just emotionally, but physically, spiritually. That’s when I realized that this wasn’t just healing—this was alchemy. It is an alchemical process.

And if you want to really alchemize your experience as a human, the way to do that is through feeling. 

I do feel like the way that we do this though—the way that a lot of people talk about it—is really complicated and it’s not, like, sometimes they make it seem like it’s just a one off thing where you just, like, you just decide to feel it and/or you decide to let it go or you detach or whatever. I’ve heard—I’ve heard a lot of things over the years, and there was a period of time where I was like “obviously these people know more than I do, they’re in better situations in their life it looks like, so they must know something I don’t know, maybe I’m just doing it wrong”. 

And I realized that a lot of the things that I heard people say about this… they didn’t feel right. They didn’t feel right to me in my body. And that’s because a lot of the rhetoric around this still encourages bypassing. It still promotes the idea that you need to feel differently than you presently are experiencing feeling, because of X, Y, and Z reason.

I get that.

There is certain emotions that are not as easy—that are much more challenging or uncomfortable or even painful to feel—than others.

And all of them are important.

All of them are valuable.

All of them are parts of you that want you to welcome them home and then when you get all of them together you can have a little party and put party hats on everybody.

Just personify your emotions.

It’s—it’s cool.

That’s what started happening to me through this process—everybody started—all my emotions started kind of personifying themselves and they’d show up as these specific kind of energies. 

This is weird for me to describe because I have what would be considered aphantasia. 

I cannot, like, voluntarily visualize the way that, apparently, a lot of people can. I didn’t even know that was a thing that was possible until several years ago and I had to go through an entire process of feeling like my brain was broken because I don’t see things the way other people do.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have an imagination.

It doesn’t mean that, you know, like, the way I visualize is just… it’s not visual. 

Which seems completely contradictory.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that when I have interacted with a lot of my emotions, these energies—these archetypical energies that encompass emotions—they didn’t… personify themselves in a way that I could very much describe to you.

One of the most interesting ones for me was the personification of control.

They came out as being, like, this very interesting, almost monstrous sort of creature. And it was like, when I first interacted with them as, like, that energy—they had almost like a mask of my face with this really, like, unnatural sort of grin and their hair was, like, pin straight. Which completely contrasts—my natural hair is pretty curly, you know—so it was like manipulated to be straight. And they had this really long body with like a million arms. It was just like a bunch of arms and hands. It was really weird and it really brought into focus how much control had been a part of my life. How much I had tried to control different things—often subversively—because I needed to be able to feel safe. And when I started understanding this energy, and this emotion, I could start to let things go and figure out what I actually had control over and focus on those things—focus on the things where I actually can control it.

So, I don’t know if this is something that most people do naturally or can do. 

I don’t know—I don’t know other people’s experiences with this sort of thing, right?

I just know this is my experience with the thing. And at this point I’ve basically had—and it’s not something I voluntarily did, like, I feel like you could definitely do this voluntarily, where you feel an emotion come up and you want to work with it so you find a way to personify it, right? Like, with a conscious intention—and that could potentially be really helpful for some people.

For me, though, it was like they came to me basically fully formed.

When I started really focusing on emotional processing and nervous system regulation and things like that, they would essentially arrive to me like entities. Like, they were fully formed sort of creatures or versions of me or whatever the case may be for whatever specific flavor of emotion I was experiencing in the moment. And sometimes they’ll shift to a certain degree, depending on the experience and how I’m interacting with them. But—they—it’s not, ironically, it’s not something that I really control. It’s not something where I’m like “okay, I want to see my anger this way” or “I want to see my joy this way, specifically”. They just show up like that. 

If this is something that you do or have an experience with or do consciously and intentionally—I would love to hear about this, because I’ve never really talked to anybody about this before and sometimes it makes me feel a little nuts.

Because I do—it’s like—I have a relationship with these energies because of this, right?

It’s not that I didn’t have a relationship with them before, but I have been able to fully integrate them and take them all as part of me—as being mine—as being in relationship to them because of this. 

And that’s not to say that you can’t do that if you don’t do this.

This is just the way my experience has been and I did get to a certain point where I had interacted with, like, all of these kind of, base emotions that had a really strong pull on my energy and really affected the way that I was operating in the world. And at a certain point joy came around and was like “hey, everybody’s here, let’s have a party! Let’s stick party hats on everybody!” And, you know, like, some of them are wearing like three party hats. Like, it was a thing—it was genuinely really enjoyable for me and I have a much easier time, kind of, like, sitting in communion with the way that I feel at any given moment because of this.

Because I’m like, okay, this is just a part of me that may be rejected or it needs to tell me something.

There’s a message here.

This is a guide.

This is a guide, right? That wants to tell me something.

A lot of this relates to our intuition and intuition, I feel like, is something that’s very vaguely touched on, you know? We’re often told to listen to our intuition and to trust our intuition, but what does that actually mean? 

And it also completely ignores the fact that your trauma—your trauma responses can masquerade as intuition—and if we aren’t really, really discerning about what’s what… if we don’t know how different things feel, if we’re really disconnected from ourselves and our bodies… then this is basically impossible.

And I know this from my own experience as someone who was very severely disconnected from their boy for the majority of their life.

I’ve had chronic pain for most of my life, I’ve had various chronic health issues for most of my life, I’ve dealt with chronic stress and trauma and I’ve dealt with severe dissociation.

I sometimes think that I have been dissociated for most of my life.

I wasn’t in my body—I wasn’t present in my body—I wasn’t able to be because I needed to be disconnected in order to survive, in order to survive.

And I feel like this is something that our culture actively cultivates—we teach people, we encourage people, to be disconnected—to be disassociated. And it’s not an easy thing to choose to come home to your body and be in your body especially if you have trauma, especially if you have chronic pain, especially if you have all of these different circumstances that teach you that being in your body isn’t safe.

And if you don’t have the resources—if you don’t have the support—if you, like, you can’t do that.

And so I don’t blame people who aren’t able to do that or even don’t want to. And I also know that long term, if we continue to move forward with a culture that pushes this kind of disconnection, we are all going to suffer for it—we are already suffering for it.

And choosing to be disconnected from yourself—if you feel like that’s a choice you’re making—then it’s important to, you know, I feel like it’s probably important to figure out why. What is it you need? What you might need access to in order to shift that. Because long term, your causing yourself harm and I’m not saying that you want tot be doing that—because I don’t believe any of us are—but the only ones who can really fully understand what it is that we need in order to shift out of that is us.

And part of that is our intuition, right?

Intuition is a felt sense of knowing—it is a quiet clarity that’s rooted in inner safety. Being able to be safe with ourselves. And if we’re rejecting our emotions—if we’re rejecting the way we feel or if we’re rejecting our experiences because of some perception or believe that tells us that we’re not allowed to see them the way we actually do—or that we’re wrong or bad or low vibrational or whatever the heck the case may be—sinful—I don’t know. I didn’t grow up in that kind of paradigm, but I know it’s a thing. Then we are not able to actually access the safety that we need—the inner safety we need—to actually get in touch with our intuition. To actually be in alignment with ourselves, and in our integrity, and to be coherent with ourselves.

Like I said, trauma can masquerade as intuition—but it will show up as urgency, it’ll show up as fear, it’ll show up as reactivity—and the difference is that intuition tends to be very calm, really. At least for me. It’s like, it’s neutral—nearly robotic. It is devoid of emotional charge. It is quiet. Sometimes completely inconvenient. You don’t always want to hear what intuition has to say, and it’s not from some sense of reason, right?

Logic comes from our brain, form our mind, whereas intuition, it is a body-based knowing. And how it works for different people, I’m sure is different. I know in my experience, when I was working to really cultivate and reconnect to my intuition, it was a really challenging process to learn how much my trauma had been mimicking what I thought was intuition and that it was a mind-based process.

And they’re both important, right?

Because both of them seek to protect us. But they come from different spaces, different places, and serve different purposes.

Because your intuition is your soul compass—and if you are shrouded in layers of distortion and trauma you can’t really access this. At least, not consistently, not in an embodied kind of way.

And that’s not to say that your trauma can’t be right—because they can also overlap. You can have trauma that will, like, kind of create a feedback loop with intuition and, it’s like, it’s accurate—it’s correct—but it’s still trauma-based, and that’s a whole other thing.

It’s complicated and we live in a world that gaslights us. That teach—like I said—it teaches us to disconnect from our bodies, from our sense of feeling, our felt experience—and it’s really, really hard to learn how to trust yourself and to trust that very, very, very quiet little inner voice. That sensitive little part of you that’s just gonna whisper what your truth is when you’ve been gaslit all your life and are probably gaslighting yourself.

But there’s a big difference between feeling calm in knowing and panicked, and clarity versus chaos or confusion. Confusion is essentially, like, the embodiment of incoherence, which is why I often consider confusion to be its own form of clarity. It means I don’t have clarity about something—something is unclear—and that itself is a form of clarity because I may not know specifics, but I know something is incoherent.

And in certain cases it—there’s confusion because, like, you don’t know something, right? You might just need more information. But there’s certain situations that the—it doesn’t matter how much information you get, you still feel like there’s confusion, and that’s really—that’s an important thing to note because that is literally you telling you that we—there’s something isn’t aligning here, something is incoherent here.

So in the world that we have, that disconnects us from ourselves, form our bodies, from our intuition—how do we actually reconnect and how that process is gonna be different for everybody.

For me, a lot of it just started with being willing to sit with myself—to be in my body—and to feel whatever it was I was feeling, and listen to somatic markers, and work with my own energy. A lot of that was learning just, what did my intuition actually sound like and feel like to me. Because I learned that my intuition is always in my body, like deeper in my body, like heart level and below, often times in, like, my spleen. Whereas if it’s my mind, it’s gonna feel like it’s in my head. And my mind has lots of important information for me, but its job is not the same as intuition. And I actually went through a period where I was redoing this kind of reconnection and really getting in touch with the understanding that, oh, my intuition is very quiet and is, you know, very neutral, and so my mind started mimicking that. Like, it would literally give me information as if it were my intuition and the only way that, for a while, that I was able to discern the difference was by where I felt this information coming from. 

Did it feel like it was coming out of my head?

Or did it feel like it was coming from, like, my gut?

Because if it was coming from my head, it wasn’t my intuition. It was important to listen to and also to sometimes question, because sometimes it was just, like, my mind trying to rationalize things and it just figured out a way to communicate with me in a way that I would listen to. But that didn’t necessarily mean it was accurate or correct or what I needed to be doing. But it did mean that I needed—I got to open a dialogue with my mind, right? And communicate with it.

And it’s always really weird to talk about, like, parts of me as if they’re not me—as if they’re external of me or separate from me—‘cause they’re not. And I know they’re not. And it’s also a think where, like, to be in relationship with something, there is inherently some subtle separation. Not because there is inherent separation or real separation, but it’s like defining the edges so that you know where to work with the energies—the person, the place, the thing, the whatever.

I’ve even—as I’ve gotten more adept at working with this, one of the most interesting experiments that I did regarding, like, listening to my intuition, was what I sometimes refer to as the Stardew Valley mining experience—experiments. And if you’re not familiar with Stardew Valley, it is a farming simulator game. It’s a cute little, like, pixel art kind of… it’s a, you know, very calm kind of cozy little game. You get a farm and you can grow different plants and you can go fishing and you can mine and you get cute little cows and chickens and stuff. It’s like a really cute game.

I’ve played it—I used to play it, like, a lot. A lot. I’ve played—I’ve played many many hours of Stardew Valley. And I was playing it more recently, I feel like this was maybe late last year, and I was doing, you know, some mining in the game and if you’re unfamiliar with the way that the mining system for Stardew Valley works, you basically—you obviously—you go into the mine and then you have—there’s different levels to the mine. And in order to move down a level in the mine you have to find a ladder. And the ladder is usually hidden in a rock somewhere and it’s totally random, right? It’s complete—it’s a completely random algorithm as part of the program, and generally, this means you have to just hit a bunch of rocks or bomb a bunch of rocks or whatever until you find the ladder. Unless you have ladders—or staircases, I guess it is—but the point is that I was doing this, right? And I was curious if I could get, like, an intuitive hit about the location of the ladder in this game.

And if I really just sat and listened for it, I would get directions—and they weren’t specific—it wouldn’t be like go over and hit, like, this specific rock over here or something. It was very much just, like; left, right, up, down. And sometimes at first I’d be like… is this even right?

But I would just—I would just follow whatever was coming up and I hit the rocks and it was always right. 

That was the weirdest part about it is that if I was really grounded and, like, in my body and really listening… it was right every single time.

Even if it took me a while to get to the actual rock that had the ladder, it was right—it would be to the left or it would be down or whatever I was getting. 

It was really weird.

And I don’t really know how this works and so if somebody out there has, like, explanation for how something like this works, especially because, like, this is, you know, this is a random program in a video game—that somehow my intuition was able to pick up on and give me some degree of instruction and direction for. 

And I don’t know why it works.

I just know it did, which has given me a lot more confidence in trusting it.

It’s still really challenging sometimes—it can still—I still question, you know, sometimes I get these hits and I’m just like, what? Why?

But more often than not, if I listen to it, that’s the right move. 

Even right now, you know, I’m sitting here—I’m questioning if I am off somehow… something about something I’m doing maybe doesn’t feel quite right, and I’m not sure why.

So maybe I need to put the phone down and stop.

So, I actually did stop recording after this.

I recorded the bulk of everything that you just listened to yesterday, and I honestly considered just leaving the episode as it was, especially ‘cause it’s pretty long. But I decided that there were a few more things that I wanted to add, and so I’m gonna record that now, because, especially considering the fact that I literally in the middle I—well not, maybe not in the middle—but toward at the end of that episode, I felt something in my body that told me to stop and I listened to it and I stopped—it feels relevant to discuss discernment, even if just a little bit.

Because discernment is the crystallization of this whole alchemical process. It’s turning insight into choice, it’s the alignment of your decisions with your intuition and your embodied experience. This is as opposed to having reactive decisions—subconscious choices—made for you, as opposed to intentional and embodied responses and choices. 

Essentially, it’s the cultivation of free will.

We talk about free will a lot and we often say “oh, well everybody has free will” and that kind of thing, and, to be honest, I don’t know how true that is.

I feel like you can only really access free will if you are really, fully conscious and aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Otherwise you are just operating on subconscious programming. And I feel like this is really, like, apparent if you consider something like the Libet experiments—I believe it’s pronounced Libet—Benjamin Libet, he was a researcher in the 80s, he did these experiments where they found out that what people thought were conscious decisions they were making were already processes that they could track through the brain waves before the person apparently choosing to make the decision was aware. So it was already a body process that was in process before their mind knew it was a choice. So, you know, food for thought.

This is something that i’ve thought about a lot.

A lot, a lot.

Even right now, am I consciously choosing to talk about what I’m talking about?

Am I just a puppet on the strings?

Or am I really aware of myself enough to fully make this choice? This decision right now to say these words?

And we’re gonna make mistakes. 

You know, you get to be okay with making mistakes throughout the process of refining your discernment and reconnecting to yourself. And that can be really challenging, especially if you’re someone like me who has a history of perfectionism, and, you know, whatever your particular flavor—flavors of survival based adaptations are.

So it’s important to remember that discernment is about listening—really listening—to your body.

Listening to your soul.

And it’s not about getting it perfect. 

There’s a lot of moments where discernment didn’t show up in some big, dramatic way—it was a quiet “no” in my chest or that weird kind of “off” feeling that I couldn’t explain. Even if everything seemed fine on the surface.

Sometimes, it’s meant stepping away from relationships that might have made sense on paper, but they didn’t feel right in my body.

It’s about not contorting myself to be digestible, and letting go of things that sometimes I wanted to work—sometimes, I wanted them to work really, really, really badly—but they might not have felt right for some reason.

It can look like walking away, not because you don’t have love for the person or the place or the project or whatever it is—but because the cost of staying is self abandonment. And if I have to abandon myself to stay, I’m already leaving the most important part of me behind.

If I have to rationalize a relationship that doesn’t feel good or make sense to me, I’m wasting my energy. And, I mean that, like, that’s debatable. Like, sometimes we say you can’t waste energy, right? It’s always in flow, always in flux, whatever. But it’s not necessarily—it’s not the most optimal use of my energy, right? 

Because if I’m rationalizing what I’m doing… that’s not what the thinky bits are designed to be used for.

They’re for remembering my keys, and figuring out what to eat for dinner, and contemplating the mysteries of the universe—not for arguing with my intuition.

Practicing discernment is not always easy. 

And I know that, for me, it’s gotten clearer the more that I listen. 

Alignment doesn’t shout—it’s not gonna yell at you—it whispers. 

And the more I trust that whisper—the quiet “yes” in my gut, in my spleen, in my body—or the “no” or the whatever the message may be—the more at home I feel in myself.

This is an emotional, intuitive journey.

It is a spiral of becoming.

There’s no finish line, which can be stressful sometimes. Sometimes we want to have a defined goal—to know this is the end post—this is how I know I’m complete or whatever. 

But you’re already complete.

And you’re kind of just inviting all of those rejected parts of you back home.

And it’s a constant unfolding. 

A process of deepening your presence and aligning with the choices that are most coherent for who you are in each moment.

Every soft little moment of curiosity—that matters.

Every breath of your truth—that’s the gold.

You’re the vessel, you’re the flame, you’re the philosopher and the stone.

Your feelings are the gold, your intuition is your compass, and your becoming is your map.

I know I personally am really bad at directions.

You’re your own alchemist, your own oracle, and your own home.

So welcome home.

I’d love to know how this landed for you, so if you have some thoughts, if you have some feelings—feel free to let me know.

And remember, that I love you.