I sat down with Justina on the Sacred Soul Sisters podcast a few weeks ago, and I want to be honest about why I’m posting it here.
Her room is not my room. She comes at this through energy work and spirituality; I come at it through nervous systems and adult learning. But we ended up in the same place, which is what made the conversation worth having. Two people who arrived from opposite directions at the same observation: the women who look like they’re handling it are frequently the ones nobody thinks to ask about.
We got into a lot. The lion in the living room — what your body does when the threat sits on your couch for a decade, and why it keeps doing it after the lion leaves. Why your nervous system is the CEO and your rational brain is the intern who does not get a vote during a crisis. The threat database and the safety database, and why your system keeps running the old pattern when one of them is empty. The micro-moment work, which is smaller and less impressive than it sounds and is the only thing I’ve seen actually move the needle.
I also said the thing I say everywhere, which is that a finish line sells and a finish line is a lie. You will end up back in the Ashes. That is not failure, it is the design. What changes is how long the return takes.
And I told a story I don’t tell often, about a Christmas tree and a three-year-old and the moment I realized I was managing three people’s emotions and none of them were mine.
If you’ve been reading here and wondering what the Spiral actually is, this is probably the fastest way in. It’s a conversation, not a lecture, and Justina asked me one question near the end that I genuinely had to sit with.
Fair warning: the episode uses vocabulary I don’t use. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the substance holds, and I’d rather point you to a good conversation in a different dialect than only ever talk to people who already sound like me.