Written by Charlotte Cheetham, Gut Health Coach Charlotte Cheetham is an expert coach in gut health for menopausal women. She is the founder of Lifeinsights and aims to help all menopausal women one by one to heal their symptoms, which are preventing them from living a normal life. She has also written articles for Healthieyoo magazine about gut health, menopause, and psychobiotics. Gut health plays a crucial role in digestion, energy, mental clarity, and overall well-being, especially for women over 40. This article explores how fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics work together to support a healthy gut microbiome, reduce common symptoms such as bloating and brain fog, and promote long-term health through simple, sustainable dietary habits. Spring cleaning isn't just for your home When spring arrives, many of us feel inspired to clear out closets, open the windows, and create fresh space in our homes. Yet one area that often gets overlooked is our gut. For many women over 40, symptoms like bloating, brain fog, fatigue, irregular digestion, and stubborn weight gain can start to feel like an unavoidable part of aging. The reality is that these symptoms are often signs that the gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria living within our digestive system, needs attention. Just as a garden thrives when it is nourished and tended regularly, your gut ecosystem flourishes when it is fed the right nutrients. Three of the most powerful tools for supporting a healthy gut are: Fibre Fermented foods Prebiotics. Together, these nutritional powerhouses help support digestion, reduce bloating, improve energy levels, and may even enhance mental clarity. Let's explore how each one works and how you can begin incorporating them into your daily routine. Understanding the gut microbiome Before diving into specific foods, it is helpful to understand why the gut matters so much. The gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that influence digestion, immune function, hormone balance, metabolism, mood, and cognitive function. Researchers often refer to the gut as the body's "second brain" because of its close communication with the nervous system through the gut-brain axis. In fact, approximately 90% of serotonin, often called the "feel-good neurotransmitter," is produced in the gut. When the microbiome is balanced, many women experience better digestion, increased energy, improved focus, more stable moods, and reduced inflammation. When it is out of balance, symptoms such as bloating, constipation, brain fog, and fatigue often emerge. The good news is that small dietary changes can create meaningful improvements. Fibre: The unsung hero of gut health Despite its importance, fibre remains one of the most under-consumed nutrients in modern diets. Many women consume less than half of the recommended daily amount. What is fibre? Fibre is a type of carbohydrate that the body cannot fully digest. Instead of being broken down and absorbed, fibre travels through the digestive tract, where it supports healthy digestion and feeds beneficial gut bacteria. There are two primary types of fibre: Soluble fibre: Soluble fibre dissolves in water and forms a gel-like substance. Its benefits include slowing digestion, supporting blood sugar balance, helping manage cholesterol levels, and feeding beneficial bacteria. Sources include oats, apples, chia seeds, flaxseeds, and beans. Insoluble fibre: Insoluble fibre adds bulk to stool and supports regular bowel movements. Sources include whole grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruit skins. How fibre supports brain function Many women are surprised to learn that fibre does not just help digestion. When gut bacteria ferment fibre, they produce compounds called short-chain fatty acids. These compounds help reduce inflammation, support the gut lining, influence brain health, and improve communication between the gut and brain. Emerging research suggests that a fibre-rich diet may contribute to improved cognitive function and reduced brain fog. Signs you may need more fibre You may benefit from increasing your fibre intake if you experience bloating after meals, constipation, irregular digestion, energy crashes, persistent hunger, or difficulty concentrating. One important note: increase fibre gradually and drink adequate water to avoid worsening digestive discomfort. Fermented foods: Nature's probiotics Long before probiotic supplements existed, cultures around the world relied on fermented foods to support health. Fermentation is a natural process in which beneficial bacteria transform food. The result is a product rich in probiotics, live microorganisms that may help support gut health. Popular fermented foods include yogurt with live cultures, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, and kombucha. Why fermented foods matter Fermented foods can help increase microbial diversity within the gut. A diverse microbiome is often associated with better digestion, improved immune function, reduced inflammation, and greater resilience to stress. A landmark Stanford University study found that participants consuming fermented foods experienced increased microbiome diversity and reductions in inflammatory markers. This is particularly relevant for women over 40, as inflammation often increases during the menopausal transition. The connection between gut health and brain fog Brain fog is one of the most common complaints among professional women. It can show up as forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, mental fatigue, and reduced productivity. While many factors contribute to brain fog, gut health is increasingly recognised as an important piece of the puzzle. An imbalanced microbiome may contribute to increased inflammation, blood sugar instability, nutrient deficiencies, and disrupted neurotransmitter production. Supporting gut health through fermented foods may help create an environment that supports clearer thinking and improved mental performance. How to start using fermented foods If you are new to fermented foods, start small. Try one tablespoon of sauerkraut with lunch, a serving of kefir at breakfast, or yogurt with berries as a snack. Consistency matters more than quantity. Prebiotics: Feeding the good bacteria If probiotics are the seeds, prebiotics are the fertiliser. Prebiotics are types of fibre that nourish beneficial bacteria already living in your gut. Without prebiotics, many beneficial microbes struggle to thrive. Common prebiotic foods Excellent sources include garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus, chicory root, Jerusalem artichokes, green bananas, and oats. These foods provide fuel that allows beneficial bacteria to grow and multiply. Why prebiotics are often missing Many women unintentionally avoid prebiotic foods because they have been told to eliminate carbohydrates or certain vegetables. While some individuals with digestive disorders may need temporary dietary modifications, unnecessarily restricting prebiotic-rich foods can reduce microbial diversity over time. The goal is not perfection. The goal is building tolerance and supporting a thriving ecosystem. The power of combining fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics While each of these components offers unique benefits, together they create a powerful synergy. Think of your gut like a garden. Fibre improves the soil, prebiotics feed the plants, and fermented foods introduce beneficial new species. When combined consistently, they help create an environment where beneficial microbes can flourish. A simple "gut spring clean" plan Instead of restrictive detoxes or juice cleanses, consider a gentler approach. Week 1: Add fibre. Focus on one extra serving of vegetables daily, along with foods such as chia seeds, oats, and legumes. Week 2: Introduce fermented foods. Add yogurt, kefir, or sauerkraut to your routine. Week 3: Increase prebiotics. Include foods such as garlic, onions, asparagus, and oats. Week 4: Build consistency. Create meals that combine all three elements. For example, enjoy grilled salmon with roasted asparagus, quinoa, and a side of sauerkraut. Common mistakes to avoid Going too fast: Suddenly increasing fibre may temporarily increase bloating. Gradual changes are more sustainable. Relying solely on supplements: While supplements can be helpful, food-first approaches provide additional nutrients and plant compounds that support overall health. Ignoring lifestyle factors: Gut health is not just about food. Sleep, stress management, physical activity, and hydration all play important roles in supporting a healthy microbiome. The bigger picture: Progress over perfection One of the greatest misconceptions about gut health is that it requires an extreme protocol. Many women are already overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice. The truth is that small, consistent changes often create the most meaningful results. Adding a little more fibre, including fermented foods regularly, and feeding beneficial bacteria with prebiotics may seem simple. However, over time, these habits can help support digestion, energy, mental clarity, and overall well-being. Final thoughts Spring is a season of renewal. It is an opportunity to create healthier habits that support how you feel every day. Rather than focusing on restriction, consider what you can add to nourish your gut microbiome. By incorporating fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics into your routine, you are not simply supporting digestion. You are investing in the health of your brain, immune system, metabolism, and future self. Your gut is constantly communicating with the rest of your body. When you support it well, you may be surprised by how much better you can feel. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Charlotte Cheetham Charlotte Cheetham, Gut Health Coach Charlotte Cheetham is an expert Gut Coach for menopausal women. After suffering from an acute gut infection, she had to learn how to manage her gut health to prevent another massive flare-up. She has learned how to manage her nutritional needs to become healthy and happy during menopause. Her mission is to help as many women as possible manage their diet and lifestyle, so they can also learn how to become healthy and happy again.

Written by Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur Danielle McKinon, founder of Eat Sleep Ride, a rural-based charity in Scotland, and a certified Equine Leadership Coach. Part of the global TeachingHorse network, Danielle applies the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership to help individuals and teams lead with confidence through uncertainty. How many of us, to get into the rooms that matter, have had to climb into a box? A box that says, “Be professional. Be certain. Don’t be too much. Show them the part of you that fits the role, and keep the rest out of sight.” Leaders do it more than anyone. We perform composure we don’t feel. We lead by the spreadsheet because numbers feel safer than people. We hide the parts of ourselves that don’t match the job title. I’ve spent most of my life being put in boxes and the last few years learning that the best leadership begins the moment you climb out of them. The boxes I was handed I grew up in care. I’m neurodivergent. When I started out, I didn’t understand finance or strategy at all, and for a long time, I believed those were boxes I was stuck inside, too different, too far behind, not the kind of person who leads anything. I had it the wrong way round. Those boxes weren’t my cage, they were the source of everything I now bring as a leader. The empathy, the pattern-spotting, the refusal to accept that broken systems have to stay broken, none of that came in spite of my history. It came because of it. Lived experience isn’t the thing you apologise for in leadership. Increasingly, it’s the thing that sets a leader apart. What I built It started in 2017 with one pony I rescued online for fifty pounds a pony, the world had written off as worthless. I founded Eat Sleep Ride around that single act of refusing to accept what something was “worth,” and for the next seven years, I built it, piece by piece, mostly learning as I went. Over those years, it grew into something far bigger than I had first imagined. We outgrew our first home and, just a week before the pandemic, moved to Quarry Farm, twenty-four acres of old landfill that nobody else wanted. Ninety local volunteers gave more than two thousand four hundred hours to turn a rubbish tip into a living place that runs entirely on the sun. We became an accredited riding school, teaching as well as rescuing, and took on horses of every kind: rescue, rehabilitation, working, and livery. In 2024, we became a registered charity after seven years of proving the work first. Out of all of it grew Herd Dynamics, my leadership and development work, born the day I realised that what the horses were teaching our young people, they could just as powerfully teach leaders. The systems meant to support people like us were broken, so we built our own. Building something from nothing over seven years teaches you more about leadership than any course. But the deepest lessons didn’t come from the spreadsheets or the strategy. They came from the horses. What horses teach about leadership Here is the thing about a horse: it cannot be fooled. It doesn’t care about your title, your diagnosis, or whether your numbers balance. It reads your nervous system, not your CV. Walk into a paddock pretending to be calm while your insides are in knots, and the horse will know before you’ve taken three steps and it will respond to the truth, not to the performance. That is the most honest feedback a leader will ever receive. Horses are prey animals, which makes them exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of everyone around them. They co-regulate. When you are genuinely calm and present, they settle. When you are braced and tense, they brace too. We understand the science of this now. Our nervous systems are wired to sense safety or threat in one another, well below conscious thought, which the neuroscientist Stephen Porges named neuroception. It runs both ways between species. Studies tracking heart rate variability have shown that the heart rhythms of a human and a horse can genuinely synchronise as they interact. Leaders do this to their teams every single day without realising it. Your people are reading your regulation, not your words. A horse simply makes it impossible to ignore. So horses teach the things leadership courses struggle to. Presence over performance. Influence without force, because you cannot bully a half-tonne animal into trusting you. You can only earn it. Reading a room before a single word is spoken. The humbling truth is that real authority starts with regulating yourself first. Lead like the lead mare Spend time with a herd and you notice something that quietly dismantles most of what we’re taught about authority. The horse the others choose to follow is rarely the biggest, the loudest, or the most forceful. Force creates movement a panicked, scattering kind of movement but it doesn’t create followers. The horse the herd actually trusts to lead them to water, to safety, to rest, tends to be the steady one. The consistent one. The one whose calm the others can borrow. We see the same thing in every organisation. There’s the leader who drives from behind with pressure and fear, and gets compliance and churn. And there’s the leader the team genuinely follows, not because of the org chart, but because being near them feels safe enough to do good work. One commands. The other is chosen. Horses have known the difference for millions of years, we’re only now catching up. Why do leaders come to the herd This is exactly why, through my leadership practice, Herd Dynamics, I bring leaders and teams to the herd. Not to ride for sport, but to learn through intuitive, ground-based and ridden work what it feels like to lead a being that responds only to who you actually are. Picture it. An executive who can hold a boardroom of forty people steps into the arena, asked to do nothing more than walk a pony a few paces beside her. She squares up, takes the lead rope, gives the instruction in her boardroom voice and the pony plants its feet and refuses to move. She tries again, firmer. Nothing. You can watch the frustration rise, the old reflex to push harder. Then, usually, something gives. She exhales. Her shoulders drop. She stops performing leadership and simply becomes present. The pony, without a word, falls into step beside her. People feel that shift in their own body in a way no slide deck could ever teach them. They carry it back to their teams, their negotiations, their kitchen tables. The horse becomes the most truthful coach in the room. The proof If you doubt how powerful this is, let me give you the smallest example. A girl came to us when she was ten years old. She wouldn’t speak a word to anyone at school. But she would talk to a horse. Years on, she is thriving, full of voice and purpose. If the herd can reach the most guarded, shut-down ten-year-old, imagine what it can unlock in a guarded executive who has spent twenty years in the box. The mechanism is the same. So is the result. Regeneration: Leadership as creating the conditions There’s a reason our sanctuary sits on an old landfill site. We took ground that had been written off as poisoned and useless, and we didn’t force anything to grow. We created the conditions, we cleared what was toxic, we planted, we waited, we trusted the process. Today, there are a thousand trees, ponds full of frogs, and birdsong where there used to be seagulls and waste. People are no different. Teams are no different. You cannot force a person to flourish any more than you can shout at a field and demand a harvest. What a leader can do, the only thing a leader can really do, is create the conditions in which growth becomes possible. Safety. Time. Belief. Then get out of the way and let it happen. The best leadership I know isn’t extraction. It’s regeneration. Leading without emptying yourself There’s a leadership lesson I learned the hard way, too. For years, I was the one who absorbed every shortfall, every tight month, every gap, every job nobody else would do. Capacity was just me, stretched thin across everything. But you cannot pour into other people from an empty cup. A leader who never regulates their own nervous system, who treats themselves as the shock absorber for the whole organisation, eventually has nothing left to give. The horses taught me that self-regulation isn’t self-indulgence. It is the precondition for leading anyone else well. Redefining what leadership is for We talk a great deal about building wealth and success. Here is what those words have come to mean to me: they’re shared. Leadership at its best isn’t command from the top of a hierarchy. It’s every voice being taken into account, and decisions being made with people, not done to them. That isn’t soft. That’s shared leadership, and in my experience, it’s the only kind that builds anything that lasts. I didn’t get here alone, either. People believed in me long before the numbers did, and that belief may be the truest form of wealth there is. Good leaders create that same belief in others. For the leader reading this So, if you’ve been climbing into a box to lead, and most of us have, here is what the horses would tell you. Regulate before you direct, because your team is reading your nervous system, not your strategy. Calm is contagious, and so is panic. Lead like the lead mare, remembering that authority isn’t the loudest voice, it’s the steadiest presence. Be the calm others can borrow. Create the conditions, don’t force the growth. You can’t command a person to flourish, but you can make it safe enough that they do. Seek the honest feedback you’ve been avoiding, and find the people, or the animals, who respond to who you are, not to who you’re performing to be. Lead as your whole self, because the parts of you that don’t fit the box are usually the very parts your people most need to see. Being human isn’t a box Someone asked me recently what box I’m in today. For once, I don’t mind the answer. I’m in a box of grace. I’m steadier than I used to be, and I can even make people laugh. But here is how I’d like to be remembered, as a leader and as a person, as someone who got up every single day to bring value, and who refused to leave any part of herself in the box. Nature never puts anyone in a box. Neither should leadership. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Danielle McKinnon Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur Danielle McKinnon is the founder of Eat Sleep Ride | Rural-Based Charity in Scotland, a rural charity using horses, nature, and coaching to support disadvantaged and neurodiverse young people. She is a qualified equine-facilitated learning practitioner, coach, and licensed facilitator of shared leadership, working locally and globally to build brave spaces for change. Her work is rooted in lived experience, community care, and the wisdom of the herd. To explore Danielle's leadership programmes, visit the Leadership at Eat Sleep Ride page at Herd Dynamics | Equine Leadership and Personal Development. These programs support Eat Sleep Ride. References: Porges, S. W. (2022). ‘Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety.’ Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16 – on neuroception and co-regulation. Marchant-Forde, J. et al. (2024). ‘Unveiling directional physiological coupling in human–horse interactions.’ Scientific Reports – on heart rate variability synchronisation between humans and horses.

Written by Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist known for blending spiritual traditions, shadow work, and leadership training. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health & wellness brand. You've probably felt it, maybe even for years. I know I did. It's like an itch that never fully gets scratched. A hunger that gets sated for a short time, and then it's there again. Gnawing at you, quietly at first, and then louder until it gets fed by another peak experience, another ceremony, or another new "medicine" experience that leaves you flying high for a while. It's that empty feeling after the retreat high fades. The moment your meditation app notification pops up, saying "Time to be mindful!" and you feel irritated rather than invited to drop in. It's the realization that you've read seventeen books about awakening and somehow feel more lost than when you started. If that sounds familiar, you're in the right place. Keep reading to find out what's really happening, and where to go when you finally stop seeking. How we got here To understand why pop spirituality is collapsing, you have to understand why it rose in the first place. The late twentieth century left a generation with a particular exposed wound, the wound of the disenchanted. The ones who know there's more to life than just working for a paycheck. Those who hear the echoes of their ancestors deep in their bones and have no idea how to connect with them. Those who dare to seek answers beyond the prescribed narrative we've been fed since birth. At that time, exploring oneself spiritually was still on the fringes of Western society. Science was consistently dismantling the mysteries of the cosmos in favor of something far more tangible and reasonable. Organized religion had, for many, become synonymous with control, shame, or simple irrelevance. This is where the dormant desire to deeply know what life is all about started to re-awaken. The grumbling in our guts began to stir and slowly take root. It's a hunger hardwired into our DNA, older than language itself. The upside of that era was a growing sense of safety and stability, a feeling that we finally understood the world and could control it. The downside was that many people became complacent, or worse, afraid of their own potential, condemning their dreams to gather dust. This created a vacuum where the search for meaning was lost for a while, and into that vacuum rushed something new. Nature abhors a vacuum. A new chapter of awareness and transformational experiences began. A tidal wave of seekers rushed in. Many of them are dissatisfied with their lives, wanting nothing more than to become enlightened people living "transformed" lives. Oh, was it glorious. The breakthroughs, the light bulbs going off, the ecstasy of healing old wounds. All of it was a welcome salve for years of prescribed numbness. So the Wellness industry was born. Eastern practices, stripped of their philosophical roots, arrived in Western gyms and office parks. Slowly, yoga trickled into the tiniest of towns across the Western world. Even into my little ole hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. The language and rituals of indigenous ceremonies began showing up at festivals and weekend workshops. Shamanism, tantra, ayahuasca, breathwork, astrology, crystals, and every healing modality imaginable suddenly became accessible, searchable, and schedulable. The supply was there to meet the demand. This is how the transformational junkie was born. A transformational junkie, TJ for short, is someone who, like me, has perpetually chased the next experience, hoping it will "change everything." It does, for a little while. Then something else happens to remind us we're "not there yet." So the healing continues, endlessly. For me, it started at 25 with the Landmark Forum. That was the gateway to a world I knew existed but couldn't access before. After that, I was obsessed. Always the next course, the next retreat, the next teacher, the next ceremony. For fifteen years, I was convinced this one would finally crack it open and I'd be free to live the life I'd always dreamed of. TJs have done the work. God knows we've done the work. Passport stamps, journals full of insights, a long roster of modalities explored. What we haven't quite managed is staying still long enough for any of it to actually land. Yet, for a time, it was real. Liberating, even. I had life-altering experiences, traveled the world, and created memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life. It was a remarkable time for people like me. I had no access to living traditions outside the Christian church, no wise elders, no intact mystical or cosmological framework. Somehow, I was able to follow the bread crumbs to finally find something that felt real. Like it was actually mine. It was as if suddenly, a door cracked open. The light peeked in, and like a moth to the flame, I went straight for it. My body softened. My mind loosened its grip. Something opened in me, and I started to understand what had been missing from my life. But doors are meant to lead somewhere. After walking through the door, I found myself standing in a very nicely decorated hallway that didn't go anywhere, with a bunch of my equally confused friends. The healing I was seeking was just a soothing Band-Aid on a deeper wound. The problem with Band-Aids The great spiritual teacher and one of my favorite authors, Martin Prechtel, who spent years learning from the Tz'utujil Maya of Guatemala, describes a particular kind of grief that runs through modern Western culture like an underground river. It is the grief of a people who have forgotten how to grieve. Who have lost the rituals, the language, the cosmological home that would allow genuine sorrow, and by proxy, genuine joy, to move through the body the way weather moves through a landscape. Pop spirituality, at its worst, offers not a cure for this grief but a way to avoid feeling it. "High vibes only. Manifest your desires. Release what no longer serves you." As long as you stay positive and focus on your vision, the life you're really here to live will be yours. Just do this course, this retreat, this medicine journey, and you'll heal your worthiness wound and finally achieve your highest potential. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better and improve your life. But there is something worth examining in a spiritual culture that has made transcendence the goal and immanence, the messy, embodied, relational, mortal fact of being here, the enemy. There's the rub. We love a good enemy to defeat. It's in every great story. A villain so diabolical that it seems impossible to beat until the hero, you, in this case, receives magical powers and assistance that finally allow them to conquer the darkness once and for all. It's not necessarily a lie, but it's not the whole story. Because eventually the cycle returns, and we must face the darkness again and again in our lifetimes. The real goal is to become at peace with this cycle and accept your journey as your own unique story, to be treasured. To know and love ourselves so authentically and so deeply that what was once a terrible insecurity becomes our cherished guidance, showing us where we still have work to do. This is where we get to the real meat of it. Those beguiling, persistent feelings. Those old triggers that just won't go away, no matter what they are not there to be gotten rid of. No, they are actually your guidance system, pointing you to the next chapter of your life. Somatic therapist Peter Levine, whose decades of work with trauma gave us Somatic Experiencing, makes a point that sounds simple but goes very deep: the body is not an obstacle to healing. It is the site of it. Trauma doesn't live in the story you tell about what happened. It lives in the nervous system, in the tissues, in the place where time stopped and never started again. You cannot think your way out of it. You cannot vibrate your way out of it. You have to go in. You have to sit with and tend to those tender, uncomfortable places inside yourself. This is precisely what genuine spiritual practice, one that's rooted in actual lineage, in the long conversations between a people and their land, in the accumulated wisdom of generations, has always understood. The Q'ero healers of the Andes do not separate the healing of a person from the healing of their relationship to the living world around them. In fact, many shamans believe that modern seekers carry souls fragmented through generations of trauma and living in a world that doesn't support the deep spiritual understanding of who we are and where we came from. The Lakota understanding of Mitakuye Oyas'in, "all my relations," is not a cool phrase for ceremonies or a bumper sticker. It is a core cosmological statement about the web of reciprocity that holds all life, and the consequences of forgetting it. The real work begins with being willing to understand that each of us comes into this life whole and complete. Nothing lacking. Then something shatters us. Some more than others. That is all a part of your unique story. Our job isn't to seek out more understanding and experiences. It's to find those lost shards of our soul and slowly start piecing them back together. This is where I love the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where they take broken pottery and put it back together with golden glue, creating something more beautiful because it was broken. Accept that this is a process that takes time. You cannot download this. You cannot get it in a weekend. Period. What lineage actually offers This is the part that tends to make people uncomfortable, because it often sounds like gatekeeping and exclusivity. It's not. Lineage doesn't mean you need to have been born into a specific culture or initiated into a specific tradition to access depth in your spiritual life. It means something more fundamental that you are in a right relationship with something older and larger than yourself, and that this relationship has continuity, accountability, and cost. The Toltec seers spoke of the human being as a dreamer. One who has the capacity to wake up within the dream of ordinary consensus reality and begin dreaming deliberately. But this waking up, in their understanding, was not a solo project. It happened within a tutelage of practitioners who had mapped the territory, who knew the pitfalls, who understood that the ego's first response to genuine spiritual work is to co-opt it and sell it back to you in a form that keeps you comfortable. Oh, that daft ego! It gets more and more clever. As you evolve as a spiritually conscious person, so does the ego. This is why so many spiritual leaders get so caught up in their own stories that they end up believing their own bullshit and become the reason many of us have grown jaded about the world of spirituality. Alberto Villoldo, who trained with Q'ero masters of the Peruvian highlands and founded the Four Winds Society, describes the Munay-Ki, the nine rites of the medicine way, not as a set of techniques to acquire but as seeds that take root in you and change you over the years, even decades. The emphasis is always on the long arc. On a transformation that reorganizes you at the level of the luminous energy field, not just the psychological narrative. Munay is most closely translated as unconditional love. My very first Ayahuasca ceremony, I set an intention I honestly didn't understand, and it's still one of the most powerful ones I have ever created. My intention for that first weekend with my grandmother was to unconditionally love myself. I didn't realize how powerful that intention was until four years later, when I looked back to see all the events that had unfolded in my life that had stripped me of who I thought I was and what gave me value, and what was under that clutter was simply me. For the first time, I could look in the mirror with real love for the man staring back at me without the distortion of my flaws and shortcomings. No, those all became part of this hodgepodge of pieces that is my masterpiece in progress. The farther I get down the path of my own spiritual journey, the deeper this learning goes. It's a lesson I revisit constantly, even over a decade later. Still evolving. I believe it will continue for the rest of my life. Enter Vedic astrology. In its classical form, it operates from a similar premise. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the foundational text of Jyotish, is not primarily a tool for predicting what will happen to you. It is a map of karma as a living, dynamic field of cause and consequence, and your engagement with it is meant to cultivate discrimination, which is the capacity to see clearly what serves the deepest evolution of your soul and what keeps you cycling through the same patterns. What all of these traditions share, and what pop spirituality largely lacks, is a cosmological seriousness. They take reality to be stranger, deeper, and more demanding of you than the surface level of the wellness industry suggests. They do not promise that your higher self is waiting patiently for you to find the right journal prompt. They suggest, with varying degrees of gentleness, that genuine transformation requires genuine surrender. Not the aesthetic of surrender, but the actual relinquishing of the small self's control. That, my friend, is one of the most terrifying things for the ego. Hence, the tendency to bypass the uncomfortable stuff and head straight for the party on the beach in Bali and call it awakening. The seeker is not the problem One point I want to be clear about is that the millions of people who have turned to crystals, horoscopes, and breathwork retreats are not foolish. Nor is their interest, money, or time wasted. It just isn't the end of the story. They are hungry. They are trying, in the language and resources available to them, to find something real. Something deep. Our modern culture failed them, not the other way around. When almost an entire civilization loses its rites of passage, loses its respect for elders, loses its teachers and guides, loses its connection to the land and the dead and the unborn, people must improvise. So they reach for whatever shards of the sacred they can find. That reaching is beautiful. It's courageous. Honorable, even. It is the same instinct that built the great temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and painted the cave walls at Lascaux in France. So what's the lingering question most seekers wish to answer? Quite simply: who am I, really? Under the accomplishments, bank accounts, family wounds, and social programming. This is where the broken shards come back in. So what do you do when you realize you've been hoarding the shards instead of seeing how they all connect? You go deeper. You get curious about how they fit together, and you really take the time to file off the sharp edges and begin doing the painstaking work of piecing yourself back together. Not better, not faster, not more. Deeper. Stronger. Find a practice that has roots for you. Trust that your inner guidance system knows exactly where you need to go. Exactly the path that will take you to the next piece of yourself that needs to be found and tended to. When you're ready, you'll find a teacher, a real one, with their own lineage and their own scars and their own unfinished becoming. One you don't have to fawn over or perform for. One who sees you so clearly that it makes you uncomfortable sometimes, and yet you also feel okay to be just the way you are. Accept that this will take longer than you want it to, cost more than you planned, and ask things of you that the Instagram version of spirituality never could. You let yourself be changed by something you cannot predict. You finally surrender to the process and humbly take the next step, and then the next. "Left foot, right foot," as my dear friend Michelle always says. What's coming So, where is all this leading? Here's what I see. There's a shift happening right now in the cultural conversation around spirituality. Many of us have grown disenchanted with the promise of living the life of our dreams and manifesting our first million while working remotely from a beach in Costa Rica. We've lost interest in chasing our highest potential and are slowly coming to terms with the deep work needed to actually be prosperous and at peace. People are moving away from whitewashed eclecticism, which is basically a spiritual buffet, the mix-and-match menu of enlightenment that defined the wellness era, and moving toward something with more substance that has deep roots and dirt under its nails. There's a growing hunger for practices that are embodied rather than aesthetic, rooted in particular traditions, particularly relationships with land and ancestry, and hard-won understandings of what it means to be human. We're starting to choose depth over what just looks and feels good. Growing roots so our branches have greater reach. This is where we get to integrate the best of what we've learned and experienced, because everything you've done up till this point is part of your unique story. It will contribute to crafting the lens you see the world through next. So all is not lost and nothing is wasted. It's grist for the mill. Don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. That would be a mistake. This is not a regression. It is a maturation. It's the stripping away of all the things you thought were you, to find out who you really are. Getting down to your naked truth. How beautiful that is. Warts and all. This is accompanied, I think, by a willingness to sit with what genuine practice actually requires: continuity and consistency, not just peak experiences. Real community, not just content. Grief, not just gratitude. This is where we get to do the daily labor of becoming someone who can actually show up for their own life. The long way home to yourself, and remember that age-old truth that life is about the journey, not the destination. Astrologically speaking, Neptune, the great dissolver, is shifting signs, moving from the dreamy fog of Pisces, where illusions flourished and everything felt potentially magical, into the fire of Aries, where things are called to be real or be burned away. Astrologers across both the Vedic and Western traditions are marking this as one of the most significant collective thresholds in a generation. What dissolves is what was never solid. What remains is what was always true. The death of pop spirituality is something to celebrate At the end of the day, the death of pop spirituality is not something to mourn. I think it's something to celebrate, actually. This is a time of great awakening, and the most profound awakenings come with disillusionment, the recognition that we need to shine a warm light into the darkness that has been left in the cold recesses of humanity for far too long. The ache you feel when the retreat high fades, the restlessness that no amount of content can quiet, that is not your own shortcoming. That is your soul asking for more than any product or experience can give you. There is a living, breathing world that is profoundly and deeply interconnected, waiting for you beneath the noise. There is an end to the seeking, but it won't come from the world, it will come to you in the quiet places. In the moments where you finally put down what you've been carrying and allow life to bring you to your knees. There's power in that surrender. That's where the traditions that have been patiently carrying this knowledge through centuries of forgetting and subsequent reclamation will find you. When you're ready, the teacher will appear. Then the work is to dive into the practices that will ask everything of you. In return, they will give you back something that cannot be packaged or sold. Something that, once you find it, can never be taken away from you. Your peace. The ability to stop seeking and start truly living. You only have to be willing to be honest and go deeper than you've ever gone before. If you're ready to start that conversation, reach out here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Daryl Henderson Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist with over two decades of experience blending creativity, men’s work, and spiritual practices. He has photographed top brands and artists worldwide, including Nike and Michael Kors, and documented indigenous and peace gatherings across the globe. Drawing on this experience, Daryl guides high performers, artists, and businesses to express their stories through soul-aligned photography, branding, and personal transformation. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health and wellness brand. His work is playful, transformative, and designed to unlock authentic expression.

Written by Paula Miles, BACP-Registered Psychotherapist Paula Miles is a psychotherapist, BACP-registered, who helps people navigating anxiety, stress, and burnout. Drawing from her own experience in high-pressure corporate roles, and childhood trauma she offers a grounded, compassionate space for root-cause emotional change. She has the qualifications. She has built the career, earned the title, and delivered results that others openly respect. She is, by any reasonable standard, good at what she does. Yet, she sits in meetings with a quiet, persistent certainty that, at some point, someone is going to notice. That the competence she has demonstrated is not as real as it appears. That she has somehow been getting away with something, and it is only a matter of time before the gap between who people think she is and who she actually is becomes visible to everyone in the room. This is imposter syndrome, and it is one of the most common and least discussed experiences among high-achieving women. It does not announce itself loudly. It works quietly, running beneath the surface of an accomplished life, draining the confidence out of real achievements and replacing genuine pride with a persistent undercurrent of unease. This article explores what imposter syndrome actually is, why it is so prevalent among capable women, how it connects to anxiety and perfectionism, and what it takes to begin to move beyond it. What imposter syndrome actually is The term imposter syndrome was first introduced in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, specifically to describe an experience they observed in high-achieving women: a persistent inability to internalise success, combined with a fear of being exposed as less capable than others believed. In the decades since, the concept has expanded considerably, but the original observation has held up remarkably well under research scrutiny. A meta-analysis published in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences in 2024, drawing on data from over 100 studies and more than 40,000 participants, confirmed that women consistently score higher than men on measures of imposter syndrome. A 2025 systematic review found that the global prevalence of imposter syndrome among health service providers sits at approximately 62%. Among high-achieving female executives specifically, some estimates reach as high as 75%. What these figures describe is not occasional self-doubt. They describe a structured pattern of thinking in which a woman discounts her own competence, attributes her success to luck or circumstances rather than ability, and lives with a background fear that she will eventually be found out. The achievements are real. The credentials are real. The fear that none of it truly counts, and that she does not quite deserve to be where she is, is also real. Why high-achieving women are particularly vulnerable Imposter syndrome was originally identified in women, and the research continues to show that women experience it more frequently and more intensely than men. Understanding why matters, because the experience is not random. It reflects something specific about how women are conditioned to relate to success, to criticism, and to their own worth. Many of the women I work with grew up in environments where being capable was expected but rarely acknowledged, where praise was conditional or absent, and where love and approval were available in response to performance rather than simply in response to existing. In those early environments, the child learns something quietly but durably: that her value is not inherent. That it must be proved, maintained, and protected through achievement. That she is only as safe as her last successful performance. This is where the seeds of imposter syndrome are often planted. Not in adulthood, not in the competitive workplace, but much earlier, in the relational climate of childhood. The adult woman who cannot accept a compliment without immediately qualifying it, who cannot receive praise without suspecting it is not quite deserved, who works twice as hard as anyone around her and still does not feel like enough, is not irrational. She is carrying a very old and very understandable belief into a new context. "Imposter syndrome is not a thinking error. For many women, it is the logical conclusion of a childhood in which worth had to be earned rather than simply received." A 2025 study found that imposterism is strongly positively correlated with rigid and self-critical perfectionism, a pattern that reinforces exactly this picture. The imposter and the perfectionist are often the same person, running the same underlying programme: that she is not quite enough, and that she must keep working to prove otherwise. How imposter syndrome shows up in everyday professional life Imposter syndrome rarely announces itself as such. Most women experiencing it do not think of themselves as having imposter syndrome. They think of themselves as realistic, or as someone who just needs to work harder, or as someone who got lucky and needs to make sure they do not let anyone down. The pattern hides behind the language of humility and diligence, which makes it very effective at perpetuating itself. In practice, it tends to show up as over-preparation, the compulsive need to know everything before speaking, to rehearse before a meeting, and to triple-check before sending. It shows up as difficulty taking credit, an automatic deflection when someone compliments the work. It shows up as staying silent in a room where you have relevant knowledge, because the risk of being wrong feels greater than the benefit of being heard. It shows up as taking feedback personally in a way that cuts deeper than the comment warrants, because any evidence of imperfection feels like confirmation of the fear that has been running quietly all along. Research from the Survey Center on American Life, published in 2023, found that young professional women are significantly more likely than young men to feel like imposters in the workplace, even when their objective qualifications and performance records are equivalent. The gap is not explained by ability. It is explained by what women have been taught, explicitly and implicitly, about whether their ability is really theirs to claim. The connection between imposter syndrome and anxiety Imposter syndrome and anxiety are closely related, and research confirms what clinical observation has long suggested. A 2025 cross-sectional study found that individuals with high imposter syndrome scores are nearly three times more likely to report moderate to severe mental health symptoms. Research also shows associations with depression, emotional exhaustion, and burnout. The two conditions do not simply coexist; they amplify each other. The anxiety in imposter syndrome has a very specific quality. It is anticipatory. It is the constant, low-level vigilance of waiting to be found out. The nervous system, trained in childhood to monitor for the moment when approval might be withdrawn, carries that monitoring function into professional life. Every new project, every performance review, and every public presentation activates the same system: scan for evidence that you are not good enough. Find it wherever it can be found. What makes this particularly exhausting is that success does not resolve it. If anything, success raises the stakes. Each achievement creates a new and higher standard to maintain, and the more visible the success becomes, the greater the perceived risk of the exposure the woman fears. This is why imposter syndrome tends to intensify, rather than diminish, as a career advances. The achievement treadmill accelerates, and the fear of falling off it accelerates with it. "Success does not cure imposter syndrome. For the woman who believes she does not deserve what she has built, each achievement becomes another thing she is afraid of losing." What actually helps, and why understanding matters more than strategies Most advice about imposter syndrome focuses on strategies: reframe the thought, keep a success journal, and remind yourself of your achievements. These approaches are not without value, but they tend to address the surface of the pattern rather than its roots. Because the roots are relational and emotional rather than cognitive, cognitive interventions tend to produce only partial or temporary relief. What tends to create more lasting change is understanding. Not just knowing that the pattern exists, but genuinely tracing where it came from, what it was originally protecting, and why it made sense given the emotional environment it developed in. When a woman can see her imposter syndrome not as a flaw in her thinking but as a completely understandable response to a specific set of relational experiences, her relationship to it changes. She is no longer fighting a character failing. She is beginning to understand herself. This is the kind of work that psychoanalytic therapy is particularly well-suited to support. Not because it provides techniques, but because it creates the conditions in which a woman can slow down enough to explore the beliefs she carries about her own worth, to notice where they came from, and to begin, gradually, to relate to herself differently. Many women find that the imposter voice does not disappear entirely through this process, but it loses its authority. It becomes one perspective among several, rather than the final word. When imposter syndrome starts costing more than it should For many women, imposter syndrome is a background hum: uncomfortable, but manageable. For others, it crosses into territory that significantly affects their quality of life. When self-doubt is preventing a woman from speaking in meetings where she has relevant knowledge, from applying for roles she is qualified for, from accepting recognition she has earned, or from resting without anxiety about what her productivity says about her worth, it has become something that deserves more than strategic adjustment. The same is true when imposter syndrome is fuelling panic, chronic anxiety, or a persistent sense of emotional exhaustion that no amount of achievement seems to shift. These are not signs of weakness or of a career that needs to be managed differently. They are signs that the underlying beliefs driving the pattern need to be understood and, over time, changed at the level where they actually live. If you recognise yourself in this, it may be worth giving yourself more than another article to read or another strategy to apply. The women who tend to benefit most from therapy are not the ones who lack insight. They are the ones who are already insightful, who understand their patterns intellectually, and who have found that understanding alone has not been quite enough. What tends to shift things is not more information about the pattern, but a relationship in which something different can be experienced. Frequently asked questions Is imposter syndrome more common in women than in men? Yes. A meta-analysis published in 2024, drawing on 115 effect sizes and over 40,000 participants, confirmed that women consistently score higher than men on measures of imposter syndrome. The original 1978 study by Clance and Imes was itself conducted exclusively with high-achieving women, and subsequent research has broadly confirmed that pattern, though imposter syndrome is experienced by people of all genders. Can you have imposter syndrome even after years of professional success? Yes, and this is very common. For many women, success intensifies rather than relieves imposter syndrome, because each achievement raises the perceived stakes of eventual exposure. The more visible and established the career becomes, the greater the imagined fall. This is why imposter syndrome often goes unaddressed for years, because the outward evidence of competence makes the inner experience difficult to take seriously. What is the difference between imposter syndrome and low self-esteem? The two can overlap, but they are not the same. Low self-esteem tends to be more pervasive, affecting how a person relates to themselves across all areas of life. Imposter syndrome is more specifically tied to achievement and recognition, to the belief that one’s professional success is undeserved or fragile. Many women with imposter syndrome have genuinely good self-esteem in other areas of their lives, which can make the professional self-doubt feel particularly confusing. Is imposter syndrome something therapy can help with? Yes. Therapy, and particularly approaches that work with the emotional and relational roots of the pattern rather than just the cognitive surface of it, tends to be effective. The goal is not to eliminate all self-doubt, which would be neither realistic nor desirable, but to reduce the authority the imposter voice holds, and to help a woman develop a relationship with her own worth that does not depend entirely on her next performance. How is imposter syndrome connected to perfectionism? Research has found a strong positive correlation between imposterism and self-critical perfectionism. Both patterns share the same underlying logic: that worth must be earned through flawless performance, and that falling short, even slightly, carries disproportionate personal consequences. The perfectionist and the imposter are very often the same woman running the same fear with different vocabularies. A final note If you read this and recognised yourself in it, I want to say something directly. The fact that you doubt yourself does not mean your success is undeserved. It means you grew up in circumstances that made it difficult to fully receive what you were working toward. That is not a reflection of your ability. It is a reflection of something that happened before your ability had a chance to fully speak for itself. Understanding that distinction, and sitting with it long enough for it to become real rather than just intellectually acknowledged, is where things begin to shift. That is slower work than a strategy. It is also far more durable. If this resonates, you are welcome to reach out. Paula offers a free 30-minute discovery call, where you can talk openly about what you are navigating, ask any questions about the therapeutic process, and get a sense of whether working together feels like a supportive next step. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Paula Miles Paula Miles, BACP-Registered Psychotherapist Paula Miles is a BACP-registered psychotherapist working with anxiety, burnout, and high-functioning stress. With a background in demanding corporate environments and having grown up in a critical, emotionally unavailable, and neglectful family, she learned early to carry the pressure of being the “good,” capable, strong, and always-okay one in every relationship. She deeply understands the experience of performing while feeling depleted inside, broken, or like a failure. Paula transformed her own pain into a vocation, she supports clients in over eight countries, offering a deeply human space where people can understand their emotions, reconnect with themselves, and find a root-cause relief from the patterns that keep them overwhelmed. Sources and References: Clance, P. R. and Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high-achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241-247. Price, P. C., Holcomb, B. and Payne, M. B. (2024). Gender differences in impostor phenomenon: A meta-analytic review. Current Research in Behavioral Sciences. Survey Center on American Life. (2023). Women are achieving greater professional success, yet self-doubt is common. americansurveycenter.org Salari, N. et al. (2025). Global prevalence of imposter syndrome in health service providers: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychology. The prevalence of imposter syndrome and its association with psychological distress. PMC / NCBI. (2025). KPMG. Study on imposter syndrome among female executives. University of Idaho. (2025). Imposterism and perfectionism correlations. Published study.

Colette Duvall Pondella’s work begins where many traditional recovery spaces cannot reach, in the quiet, instinctive connection between humans and wolves. As a recovery advocate, spiritual educator, and co-founder of Shadowland Foundation and Wolf Wisdom Healing, she has spent years helping Veterans, First Responders, Indigenous communities, and others reconnect with trust, belonging, and the parts of themselves shaped by pain. At Freedom Ranch in the Angeles Crest Mountains, ambassador wolves are not treated as symbols, but as teachers whose presence can soften fear, open emotional barriers, and remind people what it means to be part of a pack. In this interview, Colette shares how her own healing journey led her to this work, what wolves reveal about emotional pain and authenticity, and why recovering ourselves may begin with remembering the wisdom we have forgotten. Colette Duvall Pondella, Author, Executive Director, Co-founder of Shadowland Foundation What first showed you that wolves could help people heal in ways traditional recovery methods often cannot? Before I met Paul, my husband and our founder, wolves were not on my radar. I vaguely remember hearing about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the 1990’s, other than that, I knew nothing. Part of their socialization was going out in public. People would stop us and ask to meet Shadow and Alaska. Many would pet them and weep. Just moved to tears by the connection. They would proceed to share stories of their dogs or times they encountered them in the wild or how much they love wolves and have pictures of them all over their walls. After establishing the nonprofit, Veterans and Indigenous Americans sought us out to just sit with them before we even had a program. One gentleman, both Indigenous and a Vet, would play his flute and spend hours with the wolves and came back once a week just to “be” with them. Eye contact with the wild moves us. It activates a remembrance inside us. A feeling about ourselves we have been searching for; a level of trust that eludes us between each other. People who are deathly afraid of dogs have visited and, within minutes, relax and beg for more contact. Visitors are met with wolf noses in their faces. Eye to eye with them. They kiss you, turn their bodies against yours, step on your feet and claim you before moving on to another. It's a demonstration of unconditional love and acceptance that some people never receive in a lifetime and the wolves give it in mere seconds. They touch hearts without having to earn it. How did your own healing journey shape the way you guide others today? Since I was three years old, I knew on every level I was on my own in this world. That soul decision kept me alive and made me a survivor, but also left me living in a constant state of wariness. In my mid-twenties, I had to address my eating disorder head-on, face the shame of exposure and do what had to be done to have even the possibility of a happy life. The hardest part was asking for help. I did many forms of therapy – 12 Step, individual and group therapy, acting classes, NLP, EMDR, hypnosis, weekend empowerment workshops, meditation, and reading books. All of it worked, except I still felt completely alone in the world. Then I met Shadow. Shortly after, I met my husband, Paul, who introduced me to his motherless female wolves, Shadow and Alaska. I spent the night. In the morning, as I awoke and sat up, Shadow and I were eye to eye. She jumped onto the bed, and this 110-pound black wolf put her forehead against mine, pushed me down onto my pillow, and held me there for what seemed like forever. When she released, she smiled and ran off to play with Alaska. Paul was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee. I asked, "What was that?" He said, "She just made you part of the pack." I was initiated. That's when I realized: recovering alone rarely works. What do wolves reveal about emotional pain that humans often hide from each other? It's not that they reveal the emotional pain – they alleviate it for the time you spend with them. You feel joy, peace, acceptance, love, a lower heart rate, contact with true power and authenticity. In a short time, you experience emotions and create new neural pathways unfamiliar to people living in constant pain. The wolves sense out the needs, their outreach is energetic, emanating from their hearts, which is the first place we instruct people to touch them. Once there, they’ve got you. One cold afternoon, being outside with the wolves was too dismal. There was a 92-year-old gentleman visiting who got down on the floor face-to-face with our Takoda for nearly an hour. I don’t know what they were giving and getting from each other, I just know that it couldn’t have happened elsewhere. We had a dear friend who was dying of terminal cancer who never revealed his diagnosis with us. The last time he visited, he did the same. Got down on the floor eye to eye with Takoda, surrounded by Alaska and some of their adult pups. All we know is that on some level, the wolves know what you’re going through, and they offer what comfort they can give. Why do you think so many people feel disconnected from themselves despite having more access to wellness resources than ever before? We have learned through our families and everyday lives that people cannot be trusted with our deepest selves. Our worst traumas have often come from those who were supposed to love us most, whether intentional or not. The Indigenous People of the Americas believed that if you hurt a child, you injure seven generations and beyond. The legacy of that wound touches everyone. We all experience loss, grief, abandonment, betrayal, shunning, and shame before we ever graduate elementary school. The disconnection becomes a kind of homeostasis, established in childhood. Just because we have more resources and information than ever before doesn't mean the barriers have fallen. Help still comes at a cost to reputations and livelihoods. For example, we have the great honor to assist First Responders. A first responder or veteran diagnosed with PTS and self-medicating can ask for help – but risks being relieved of duty or involuntarily retired, so they suffer in silence. Suicide rates in these populations are increasing exponentially. We know PTS and addiction are not curable, but they are treatable. The real question is: would you rather have a police officer carrying a gun on the streets who is drunk and hiding their condition, or one who is present, accountable, and getting better every day? This applies to the truck driver, the ER nurse or the CEO alike. Even with the massive funding, we are failing each other by pretending we are addressing mental health. We are not. In simplistic terms, trauma splits a part of your brain away from your conscious mind. Stuck in a part of your brain inaccessible to your conscious mind, it activates involuntarily in unhealthy ways when triggered. Knowing and addressing the triggered responses is where evidence-based therapeutic techniques must be embraced to reclaim yourself. The brokenness individuals feel gets alleviated by participating in a session with the wolves during our Wolf Wisdom Healing program. What are the biggest misconceptions people still have about wolves and their emotional intelligence? It's interesting that we were just discussing childhood imprints and how difficult it is to confront ourselves with gentleness. The story of Little Red Riding Hood dates all the way back to 1697, and parents still read it to children today – creating an imprint of the big, bad, grandmother-eating, child-devouring wolf. Those imprints defy all logic and reasoning, which is exactly why changing hearts changes minds. It is getting easier, though. New archaeological findings reveal how wolves taught early humans to hunt and to refrigerate food in cold pools of water. They lived in ordered communities where everyone ate and was protected by the pack, led by a bonded male and female pair, with the female protected at all costs. They are literally giddy at the arrival of a new litter of pups, with every member of the pack responsible for raising them. Brutality is not tolerated. Wolves know what we humans have forgotten. How do pack dynamics influence the way you teach trust, belonging, and recovery? The wolves themselves break the trust barrier. Belonging grows gradually as the experience of knowing yourself as a whole becomes stronger than your dissociative self. Still flawed, still with more to learn – but gifted and uniquely deserving of the life given to you at birth. Rudyard Kipling wrote, "The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf." It's masterful because each wolf's role is vital to the survival of the whole. Every rank carries a special talent, honored and protected. Pack members move to defend rather than attack. Losing one compromises the success of all. The necessary prescription for recovery mirrors this truth: recover yourself by discovering that you matter to your pack – your family and for us as humans, to the entire world. Observing our pack, visitors seems to relate to one wolf or another. They recognize themselves in the wolf they gravitate to the most. They tend to love in the wolf what they have rejected in themselves. The most striking lesson we highlight is that most people walk around with an invisible question mark, awaiting cues from others to determine their own worth, not fully aware of who they are. Wolves have no such question mark. They are who they are. They do not question it. They are truly, authentically themselves and it is unmistakable. The more someone wants to embrace these qualities, the pain starts to subside. Contact with the wolves is a once-in-a-lifetime embodiment of knowing your true self. Maybe for the first time. What shifts do people usually experience after spending time in one of your Wolf Wisdom Healing programs? The wolf visit tends to help people feel safe enough to open themselves up to us and to each other. We share stories about the wolves – including their own traumas and the origin stories Paul and I have patiently walked them through to healing. We share our own recovery journeys as well. These moments bring awareness that HOPE exists: Hearing Other People's Experiences moves mountains. Our pack family home, Freedom Ranch, sits in the Angeles Crest Mountains of Los Angeles County – a true safe haven where communing with the elements is inescapable. We offer a Medicine Wheel Ceremony: a healing prayer inside a sage-purified circle representing all stages of life. When the circle is closed, participants receive guided messages, clearing of adverse energies, and insight into memories, blocks, and unexpressed grief. Every person leaves with tangible healing tools for their emotional, physical, and psychological well-being and the promise that we are here for them. You often say healing is about "recovering yourself." What does that look like in everyday life? Creating new neural pathways is key. As I mentioned before, it is vital to trace back the origin of the pain that created the disconnect – how old you were, uncovering the mystery, and looking at it from an adult, cognitive point of reference. Clarifying what went wrong and why goes a long way toward forgiving your original response to a deep wound. Sometimes traumas happen during preverbal stages of development, which are harder to understand. A family member who remembers for you can ease that pain, if it is still available. We, humans, have an insatiable need to understand what, where, when, and how – especially after making the courageous decision to choose ourselves for the first time. Yes, courage is what it takes to shake the very foundation you've been standing on and let go of the version of yourself you needed in order to survive. True healing is finding meaning and connection through living authentically. You need tools that work for you. For me, I had a realization that I talked to myself in horrific ways. It was suggested to me to frame a picture of myself when I was a child and ask myself if I would talk to her the way I talk to myself. I ended that unconscious behavior quickly. Exercises that activate the senses and keep you present and connected are the best. Sitting up against a tree, feeling the veins in a leaf, lying in the grass listening to the birds, walking and brushing your dog, keep you present in your body. Start small. Journaling, meditating, and healing sounds can work their way into your daily routines as rituals as you discover what feels best for you. If someone feels emotionally lost or disconnected right now, where should they begin reconnecting with themselves? Embrace a touchstone you already depend on. The only place I felt safe as a child was at the top of a Live Oak in a field near my home in Houston. For others, it might be pounding the pain out in the waves of the ocean, putting your hands in the dirt of your garden, or holding a piece of jewelry gifted by someone you love. Close your eyes and ask, "Tell me what I need to know." Trust whatever surfaces as your first step. For some, the journey from the heart to the head can take a lifetime. No matter what you hear, reach out to someone you know who is safe. If you don't know who that is, close your eyes and ask, "For my highest good, who is safe for me to call?" Then reach out. It may be someone you know, a therapist, a group, a hotline, or an author whose writing made you feel truly seen. I wrote Wolf Wisdom for Recovery and Companion Workbook just for you. At Shadowland, the wolves are our teachers, inspiring transformation in a loving, gentle, and powerful way. We want to give to others what was unavailable to me and Paul as children. The wolves see you and so do we. Discover More: Shadowland Foundation Creating New Neural Pathways Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Colette Duvall Pondella

Written by Angela Dawn, Sex, Love & Relationship Coach Angela Dawn is a Certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach and a Certified Tantric Sex Coach whose mission is to empower you to find fulfillment in love & life, enrich your intimate relationships, and help couples "get closer." Most couples don't come to me because they've stopped loving each other. They come to me because they've gotten stuck in a pattern that they can't seem to find their way out of. One of the most common patterns I see is the fight or withdraw cycle. One partner gets activated and wants to talk it out, push back, defend, or push for resolution. The other partner shuts down, walks away, goes quiet, or disappears into their phone. Around and around it goes. Each person feels misunderstood. Each person feels alone. Neither of them is really getting through to the other. If this sounds familiar, you're not broken. Your relationship isn't doomed. You're just in a rough season. The truth is that you need a tool to help you get out of the cycle. As a Sex, Love & Relationship Coach, I've been sharing something with my clients lately that I'm calling a Plan for Engagement. It's simple, it's repeatable, and it works when emotions are running hot, and you can already feel the conversation starting to spiral. Why fighting and withdrawing both fail Before I share the plan, it helps to understand what's actually happening in your body during a high-tension moment with your partner. When tension rises, your nervous system reads the situation as a threat. Your body floods with stress hormones. Your heart rate goes up. Blood flow shifts away from the parts of your brain responsible for nuance, empathy, and creative problem-solving, and into the parts that want to fight, flee, or freeze. In a fight-or-flight state, you really cannot have a productive conversation because you’re each responding to a situation that feels threatening. The partner who pushes harder isn't being a jerk, they're trying to deal with a threat. The partner who shuts down isn't being cold, they're trying to survive. Both responses are protective. But neither of them actually helps the two of you connect. So the first job isn't to "communicate better." The first job is to get each of your nervous systems back online. Then you can talk. This idea (that small, deliberate steps are more effective than forcing a big breakthrough) is something I've written about before in my article on Incremental Intimacy. The same principle applies here. You don't fix a hard moment by powering through it. You fix it by slowing down and taking the next small, doable step. Here's the plan I give couples. Practice it when you're not feeling activated, so it's available to you when things are heated. The plan for engagement 1. Call for a time-out Say "We need to take a break," or "I need a time out." Or, pick a safe word together that you both agree to honor. It can be something neutral, even silly, like “Tangerine!” The agreement is when one person says the word, and both people pause. No defending, no last word, no "just one more thing." A 15-minute break, minimum. 2. Use the break to regulate your nervous system This is not the time to mentally rehearse your next argument or scroll through your phone. This is the time to move the stress chemistry out of your body. Walk around the block. Run up and down the stairs. Do push-ups. Take slow, deep breaths. Splash cold water on your face. Whatever helps you come back to yourself. If you can, tell your partner where you're going and what you'll be doing. It helps both of you stay tethered. Example: "I need a break. I'm going to run around the block. I'll meet you on the couch in 15 minutes." 3. Come back together Agree on the place and time in advance. Maybe it's the couch. Maybe it's the kitchen table. It could be a specific time on the clock. The point is that the break has a clear end. That way, neither of you is left wondering whether your partner will ever come back, which could lead to feelings of abandonment for one of you. 4. Decide whether to talk now or talk later This is the step couples often miss. Just because you've calmed down doesn't mean it's the right moment to dive back into the hard conversation. Sometimes you'll both be ready. Sometimes one or both of you need more time. Sometimes it's better to bring it into your next coaching or therapy session. Continued example (on the couch), "I know we need to talk about what happened. Is it okay if we wait until our next session?" or "I'd like to talk about what happened. Is now a good time?" The asking matters. It hands both of you back your agency and signals that this conversation is something you're choosing to have together, not something one of you is forcing on the other. Why this works A break isn't avoidance. This kind of break is the opposite. It's a pause that lets both of you return to the conversation as the people you actually want to be in your relationship. When you practice this system over time, a few things start to shift. You stop dreading hard conversations because you trust you have a way through them. You stop saying things in the heat of the moment, that you have to apologize for later. You start to feel like teammates again, instead of opponents. Most importantly, remember that you're on the same side. If you need more support If you and your partner are caught in a difficult dynamic and you want help breaking the pattern, I want to tell you about an offering I've created for couples who are working on breaking this type of cycle. The Relationship Reset My Relationship Reset session is designed to help couples connect, communicate more deeply, and remember why they chose each other. Through guided exercises in holding space, eye gazing, and heart-centered sharing, you'll leave feeling more present, more understood, and more connected. I offer this on Zoom or in person in Annapolis, Maryland. You can fill out my couples' interest form to get started, or explore my couples' tantra coaching on my website. You don't have to keep doing the same dance. There's a way through, and it starts with one small, intentional step. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Angela Dawn Angela Dawn, Sex, Love & Relationship Coach Angela (she/her) is a Certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach and a Certified Tantric Sex Coach, dedicated to helping couples get closer. With a wealth of experience in yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, she brings a holistic approach to her coaching. Angela's mission is to empower clients to find fulfillment in love and life, free from societal taboos. Based in Annapolis, Maryland, her unique perspective and extensive training in tantric practices make her the ideal guide for enriching your intimate relationships. Don't wait, the time for the best version of yourself in love and intimacy is now!

Michelle Scolaro is a licensed therapist, transformational coach, retreat leader, and founder of Created Life Consulting, where she helps high-achieving women begin living from a deep place of self-trust, truth, alignment, and stop abandoning themselves. With more than 20 years of experience in the mental health field, Michelle blends clinical expertise with transformational coaching to support women who appear successful on the outside but feel disconnected, depleted, or unsure of themselves within. In this interview, Michelle explores the hidden cost of high-functioning burnout, the subtle ways women learn to override themselves, and why self-trust is essential to creating a life that feels authentic, powerful, and fully one’s own. Michelle Scolaro, Therapist and Transformational Coach What first made you realize that so many high-achieving women are living disconnected from themselves despite appearing successful on the outside? I recognized it because women kept telling me. I have sat with highly accomplished women in therapy sessions, group rooms, workshops, retreats, networking spaces, and personal conversations. I kept hearing different versions of the same experience, “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” Or, “I never used to be this way.” Or, “I feel like I’m just going through the motions.” That is what so many high-achieving women are carrying. They are driven, capable, purpose-filled, and deeply committed to making a difference. But somewhere in the constant pushing, producing, and holding everything together, they begin to lose touch with themselves. Because women in leadership get conditioned to believe they have to become some other version of themselves in order to succeed. Until one day they realize, “I don’t think this is really me.” I recognized it because I had lived it too. At a time when I was performing at a very high level, I looked successful from the outside, but inside I felt depleted, unseen, and disconnected from myself. I think many of us believe we are the only ones feeling that way. We look around and assume everyone else has figured it out. But through my own transformational work, and through sitting in rooms with people who were brave enough to tell the truth, I began to see how universal this experience is. You speak often about self-abandonment rather than just burnout, what does self-abandonment actually look like in everyday life? Self-abandonment often starts with something as simple as going along to get along. It looks like saying yes when your whole body is saying no. It looks like staying quiet to keep the peace, laughing something off when it hurts, or pushing through exhaustion because people are counting on you. Sometimes it is subtle or momentary. The problem is when it becomes a default way of living. You start molding yourself into who you think you need to be in order to succeed, be loved, be respected, or belong. You tell yourself, “If I want to be a leader, I need to have thicker skin.” Or, “If I want to be taken seriously, I need to sound a certain way.” Or, “If I want people to accept me, I can’t be too much, too emotional, too direct, too needy, or too honest.” It is not always dramatic or obvious. Often, it looks like you are being responsible. You look polished. You look professional. Underneath, you have been conditioned to override your true self-expression in order to be acceptable to others. That is self-abandonment. You blend clinical therapy with transformational coaching in your work, where do you see the biggest gap in traditional approaches to burnout recovery? Traditional approaches absolutely have value. As a therapist, I deeply respect clinical tools, nervous system education, stress management, creating healthy boundaries, getting adequate rest, learning and practicing mindfulness, and evidence-based support. Many women need those tools, especially when their bodies have been living in a prolonged state of stress. But I don’t believe burnout is only about doing too much. For many women, burnout is the result of living too far away from themselves for too long. The biggest gap I see is that burnout is often treated as something to manage, rather than something to understand. That is the part I think often gets missed. We can teach a woman to set boundaries, but if she still believes her worth depends on being available, needed, pleasing, or productive, those boundaries will feel unsafe to her nervous system. We can tell her to rest, but if rest brings guilt, anxiety, or a sense that she is failing, rest will not feel restorative. That is where real recovery begins. Not just with better coping, but with having a relationship with yourself where you honor your needs. My work brings together the clinical and the transformational because women need both. They need tools to regulate their nervous systems, but they also need space to ask, Who have I been trying to be, and what would become possible if I stopped abandoning myself. Why do you think so many women confuse being needed, productive, or “good” with being worthy? We live in social systems whose messages teach us that being useful is an easy and safe way to be accepted and to belong. In childhood, we noticed the way adults softened when we behaved, the pride when we achieved, and the tension when we expressed too much need or emotion. Without anyone intending it, we learned that belonging must be earned. Like many women, I grew up believing that my value came from being useful, helpful, dependable, and hardworking. So I learned to anticipate needs, not to ask for too much, and become the strong one, the capable one, the one who could be counted on. Those early experiences become embedded in the nervous system. The body remembers the safety of harmony, compliance, and excellence. It also remembers the discomfort of disappointing others. As we go through life, it can continue to feel like our value increases when we meet expectations and decreases when we take up too much space. This is how core beliefs form. Not only through what we are told, but through what we feel. In adulthood, those qualities keep getting rewarded. In families, workplaces, relationships, and leadership spaces, women are praised for how much they can hold, produce, manage, and tolerate. The more capable you are, the more people rely on you. The more you produce, the more praise you receive. The more you hold, the more trusted you become. So it makes sense that worth starts to feel tied to usefulness. But being needed is not the same as being loved. Being productive is not the same as being fulfilled. This is the part so many women never stop to question, no amount of doing will ever create the feeling of being enough. That feeling has to be remembered from somewhere deeper. One of the most healing truths I have had to learn, and now help other women reclaim, is this, your value does not begin with your usefulness. It comes from your existence. You describe your retreats as more than a wellness escape. What shifts happen when women finally step out of survival mode and begin returning to themselves? When women finally step out of survival mode, their bodies get a chance to stop bracing. They begin to notice how much energy they have been using just to keep functioning, pleasing, performing, and holding everything together. At first, that can feel unfamiliar. Many women are so used to being “on” that slowing down can feel uncomfortable before it feels restorative. But once the nervous system begins to settle, something powerful happens. They can hear themselves again. They start recognizing what they want, what they need, what they have been tolerating, and where they have been overriding their truth. The retreat environment creates space for that awareness to rise without the constant noise of daily responsibility. That is why I created Thrive in Paradise. I designed it as a retreat experience where women can step out of survival mode and return to their lives with more clarity, presence, and self-trust. For me, the retreat is not about escaping life. It is about creating enough space to return to life differently. Women often leave with more softness, energy, and deeper trust in themselves. They begin creating what is next from a place of power and alignment because they finally have room to connect with who they are beneath all the roles they carry. What are the earliest signs that a woman has stopped trusting herself, even if she appears confident and capable? Self-trust is an inside job, so it can be hard to spot outwardly. But there are patterns women can begin to notice in themselves. One early sign is second-guessing. Not the occasional kind. The chronic kind. She outsources her inner authority. She asks everyone what they think, often before making a decision, and then again afterward for confirmation. She over-explains herself. She replays conversations over and over in her head. Another sign is taking longer to make decisions. What may look like procrastination is often fear of making the wrong choice. She may get stuck because she no longer trusts herself to know, choose, or recover if something does not go perfectly. Over time, every choice starts to feel negotiable. She may have spent so long overriding her own voice that she is no longer sure what it sounds like. What looks like indecision may actually be her nervous system no longer feeling safe enough to choose. This can show up outwardly in the language she uses, “We’ll see,” “maybe,” “I’m not sure.” It can also look like deference to others. She answers questions with, “What do you think?” or “I’m fine either way,” even when she does have a preference. On the outside, she may look confident and capable because she knows how to perform confidence. She can lead the meeting, solve the problem, manage the crisis, and make sure everyone else is okay. But internally, there is often a constant negotiation happening, “Was that okay? Did I say too much? Did I disappoint them? Am I allowed to want this?” When a woman doesn’t fully trust herself, she does not lose her ability to function. That is why it can be so hard to see, even for herself. She can still perform. She can still achieve. But she no longer feels anchored in herself. The work of self-trust begins when she starts listening inward again. For someone stuck in chronic over-functioning, what is one practical way to begin reconnecting with themselves again? Chronic over-functioning trains you to stay on alert, keep moving, and keep fixing, even when nothing urgent is happening. The first practice is to pause. Be still long enough to hear what your body is telling you. That may sound simple, but simple does not always mean easy. For someone who is used to over-functioning, stillness can feel uncomfortable. Even unsafe. When your nervous system is accustomed to moving, managing, fixing, and anticipating everyone else’s needs, stopping or even slowing down can feel like you are doing something wrong. That is why nervous system regulation is so important. The body needs to feel safe enough to be heard. A practical place to begin is with a few minutes of intentional stillness each morning. Use whatever time you have to start. If you only have five minutes, use the five minutes. You can build to longer over time. Before reaching for your phone or stepping into the demands of the day, pause. Place a hand on your heart. Notice your breath. Notice sensation. Ask, “What is my body telling me today? What is it asking for?” Somatic movement and body scan meditations are simple, accessible ways to begin this practice. It does not have to be long or complicated. The point is not to do it perfectly. Just do it, and do it consistently. Over time, those few moments of stillness give you something to build on. They help your body begin to experience safety, presence, and connection again, which supports your overall well-being. This practice may seem small, but it matters. This is part of what I explore in my upcoming book, self-trust begins in the small moments where we stop overriding ourselves and start believing that what we feel matters. Your work consistently returns to the idea of living “from truth”, how do you personally define a truthful life? For me, living from truth means living from your own inner knowing rather than performing a version of yourself that was created to please and impress others, or for self-protection. It means checking in with yourself often and asking, Does this choice feel aligned with my values? Does it reflect what I actually want? Is this connected to the life I am creating, or am I living inside someone else’s expectations? That is why I named my company Created Life Consulting. I believe we are all authors of our lives. We are writing our own stories, whether we realize it or not. Living a truthful life means becoming conscious of the story you are writing and having the courage to create it from the inside out, on your terms. It does not mean you always know exactly what comes next. I am constantly evolving, creating, and learning as I go. But I keep returning to myself. I keep asking myself whether the choices I am making feel authentic and aligned. For me, truth is not only intellectual. It is embodied. It is something you feel. Your body often knows when something is off before your mind can explain it. A truthful life is one where you stop abandoning yourself to look good, keep peace, or make everyone else happy. It is remembering that your happiness is your responsibility, and other people’s happiness is theirs. That is not selfish. It is freedom. When you live from that place, life feels more honest, more powerful, and more fully your own. If every high-achieving woman reading this interview remembered one thing about success and self-trust, what would you want it to be? At the heart of my work is a belief that women are at their most powerful when they stop performing and start honoring who they truly are. So many high-achieving women have learned to lead, serve, succeed, and care for others by overriding themselves. They become excellent at holding everything together, but somewhere along the way, they lose touch with their own needs, desires, and inner knowing. Burnout is not a flaw in our wiring. It is often a symptom of self-abandonment baked into how we have been conditioned to lead, serve, and succeed. I believe prioritizing self-care is bold leadership, presence is power, and the body never lies. When a woman stands fully in her power and aligns with her truth, everything opens. Her clarity deepens. Her relationships become more honest. Her impact expands. She feels freer in her own life. So if there is one thing I want women to take from this, it is this, listen to your inner wisdom and trust yourself. That is the doorway. When a woman truly loves, honors, and trusts herself, everything changes. She stops performing for approval. She stops abandoning herself to be chosen. She stops chasing a version of success that was never really hers. From there, she gets to create a life that is rooted in truth, guided by her own wisdom, and big enough to hold her heart, her authenticity, and her bold leadership. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michelle Scolaro

Written by Pritesh Lohar, Certified Medical Oncologist Dr. Pritesh Lohar, MD, FACP, is a Board Certified Medical Oncologist. He is also a Mindvalley-certified life coach and a six-phase meditation trainer. He is the Founder and CEO of the School of Mindset Coaching. We have long been taught to view anxiety as a systemic glitch - a weakness to be medicated, a flaw to be managed, or a vulnerability that undermines our authority. The conventional self-help industry treats it as a malfunction of the mind. But what if we are misdiagnosing the problem entirely? What if your anxiety isn't a sign of fragility, but a byproduct of high-tier intelligence? For high-performing executives, visionary founders, and deep thinkers, chronic hyper-vigilance is rarely an emotional defect. More often, it is the tax paid by a highly sensitive, hyper-tuned nervous system that is processing more environmental, psychological, and energetic data than the average human biology was designed to handle. You are not broken. You are simply receiving more data than you have the bandwidth to process. Your anxiety is the price of being awake in a world built for sleepwalkers. The physics of information overload To understand this paradigm shift, we must look past traditional psychology and enter the realms of biophysics and neurobiology. Every leader is an information processing engine. Your brain and nervous system constantly scan your environment, reading micro expressions in boardrooms, predicting market shifts, detecting misalignments in team dynamics, and projecting future risks. When you possess a high sensitivity nervous system, your sensory gating, the biological filter that weeds out irrelevant stimuli, is set to an ultra refined threshold. You do not just see the data, you feel the undercurrents. This results in a massive, continuous influx of biological and psychological data: Subconscious pattern recognition: Your brain recognizes systemic anomalies long before they reach conscious awareness. Hyper empathic resonance: You absorb the unexpressed stress, friction, and incoherence of your organization. Neuro electric saturation: The sheer volume of incoming signals creates an internal electrical overload, causing the nervous system to default to a sympathetic, fight or flight state. When this immense volume of data is not consciously translated, the body reads the energetic surplus as a threat. The result is an ambient, buzzing sense of dread. It is not a psychological failure, it is a mechanical bottleneck. It is brilliant intelligence trapped in an un integrated biological circuit. From friction to flow: The data processing matrix To scale your impact without burning out your biology, you must shift from enduring the data to integrating it. Biological State Operational Mode Internal Experience Leadership Outcome Un-Integrated Overload Reactive Hyper-Vigilance Chronic Anxiety & Mental Fog Scattered Focus & Defensive Decision-Making Coherent Integration Grounded Perception Deep Certainty & Clear Vision Strategic Velocity & High-Impact Presence Moving beyond the failure threshold In executive coaching, we often encounter the Failure Threshold, the point where an individual's operational capacity is choked by their own internal resistance. For the highly sensitive leader, this threshold is breached not because of a lack of skill, but due to a lack of biological coherence. When you operate in a state of chronic sensory inundation, your mitochondrial energy is diverted away from cellular repair and high level cognitive synthesis and channeled entirely into survival architecture. You cannot lead a quantum shift in your industry if your biology is trapped in a defensive crouch. The solution is not to turn down your sensitivity. Your sensitivity is your competitive advantage, it is the source of your intuition, your strategic foresight, and your depth of influence. The solution is to build a more robust container to process it. Mastering biological coherence: Three strategic shifts To convert raw, anxious data into clean leadership intelligence, you must upgrade your internal operating system using deliberate biophysical and psychological pattern interrupts. 1. Establish somatic degating Anxiety is data stuck in the body. When you feel the familiar surge of executive anxiety, do not attempt to rationalize it away with logic. Interrupt the loop somatically. Utilize physiological sighs, two quick inhales through the nose followed by a long, extended exhale through the mouth, to instantly shift your autonomic nervous system from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic regulation. This clears the neural bandwidth so you can actually read the message behind the stress. 2. Practice energetic auditing As a leader, you must differentiate between your stress and the absorbed stress of your environment. Ask yourself, is this anxiety a reflection of my actual reality, or am I processing the unexpressed incoherence of my team or organization. Labeling the data immediately neutralizes its emotional grip on your nervous system. 3. Build a coherent vessel High sensitivity requires high capacity infrastructure. Protect your mitochondrial health. Prioritize circadian alignment, eliminate bio energetic toxins, and create dedicated periods of zero input silence. By upgrading your cellular energy production, you raise your baseline capacity, allowing you to hold massive amounts of environmental data without losing your center. The ultimate leadership metamorphosis The world does not need more desensitized, mechanical managers who move through life on autopilot. The future belongs to the conscious leader, the individual who feels deeply, perceives accurately, and acts decisively. Stop apologizing for your intensity. Stop trying to cure your sensitivity. Your nervous system is not malfunctioning, it is trying to wake you up to a higher level of awareness. When you learn to ground that electric current, your anxiety dissolves, leaving behind something infinitely more powerful, unshakeable, luminous certainty. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Pritesh Lohar Pritesh Lohar, Certified Medical Oncologist Dr. Pritesh Lohar, MD, FACP, is a Board Certified Medical Oncologist. He is also a Mindvalley-certified life coach and a six-phase meditation trainer. He is the Founder and CEO of the School of Mindset Coaching. His goal is to impact as many lives positively as he can by imparting his life experience and coaching skills to others.

Dr. O, aka Adekemi Oguntala, MD, is known for her dynamic speaking engagements, gifted connections she makes with teens, and inspirational published work about emotional education, medical conditions, and nutritional health. She is best known for her work that changes the dynamic between parents and teens, which has a ripple effect on the family. While traditional medicine aims to diagnose and treat, her focus has been to educate and heal her patients both emotionally and physically. She creates internal motivation in her clients that has reduced medication for chronic illness and enriched the relationships her clients have with themselves and others. She is so passionate about her work that others find it hard not to consider how her words can change their lives as well. In this interview, Dr. O explains emotional education and its impact on the parent-teen dynamic. She explores how emotional health shapes identity, behaviour, anxiety, chronic illness, coping skills, and family connection. Adekemi Oguntala, TheTeenDoc “You can’t develop shame on your own. It is always something that comes in our interaction with someone else." What first inspired you to work with teens? Babies are loved. Teens, not so much. I felt like teens needed better PR, and I really felt like I could do that, make teens lovable, not feared. If not lovable, then at least understood. What I did not realise at the time was that the teens in the clinic room or my private practice would not always look like teenagers. They would become the metaphorical or childhood teen of their parents, caretakers, or colleagues with whom I worked. Understanding the first teen, which appears when we are about 1 to 2 years old, and then the second teen, between the ages of 9 and 26, allowed me to understand many people around me so much better that it changed the way I practise being human and the way I practise medicine. What have teens taught you over the years that adults often miss? Adults “miss” the part of themselves that is still in their teen. In particular, they try to forget what it was, and is, like to be a teen in general. Teens become an embodiment of the unprocessed emotions that a parent could not express to their own parent. Here’s an example. A teen wants to do something their way. They feel becoming who they want to become, even if it means moving away from home, is the right thing to do. They can see their path. A parent says, “No. Stay here near your family. Why would you want to leave?” The teen feels the parent has always asked for proximity to family at all costs. It is the first priority. So they argue over opportunities such as scholarships to attend schools in other states or countries. I ask the parent, “What happened when you were a teen? Why didn’t you leave?” The mother is taken aback. She does not expect this question. She gets quiet and realises she was never allowed to consider what she wanted because she was the only girl and was expected to take care of her emotionally controlling and needy mother. She tried to defy her mother and leave, but ended up coming back without completing school. The bond was too strong and the guilt overwhelming. The issue was never this teen. It actually had nothing to do with the teen. This mother was reliving her childhood and trying to protect her child from being ostracised by the family for leaving for college. Her mother made her feel immense guilt for choosing a school just 45 minutes away. Her teen wanting to leave for college, this time requiring a plane ticket, reminded the mother of the shame and guilt she felt for wanting something for herself when she was younger. My client’s mother would have sworn she was trying to protect her daughter, but in reality, she was acting from the perspective of her own inner teen, who feared loneliness and abandonment as her daughter prepared to leave. This parent-child dynamic seems like it is between a mother and daughter, but if you look a little deeper, it is really about the mother and her enmeshment with her own mother. Why do you believe emotional awareness is so important for teens today? I think emotional awareness is critical for life. I do not mean to sound hyperbolic. Animals survive in the wild because they learn to trust their body’s nervous system. Animals raised in captivity and then released into the wild can struggle because they have not learned how to trust their instincts. They trusted someone else to care for them. This same dynamic happens with teens. They have to trust a caretaker to survive, and this can have a devastating impact when the adult has poor instincts and fears everything. The caretaker’s fear of the world causes them to repeatedly invalidate their teen’s decisions through rules, restrictions, and fear-based messages about what those choices mean regarding the kind of person they are. For the teen who grows up in a household where they are validated, even when the parent disagrees, their intuition about themselves becomes much stronger. This teen learns to trust not others, but themselves. They are not manipulated as easily. They recognise danger signs earlier. They are curious and capable of critical thinking. They know themselves better and understand their value and impact. They seem mature, not because they learned to drive at 10 years old due to having alcoholic parents, but because they understand how a moment fits into a larger picture. That type of awareness is priceless. What do parents most often misunderstand about teen behaviour? Parents most often misunderstand that their teen’s behaviour makes sense. Stay with me. If you are a toddler and accidentally hit your dad in the eye, it can hurt. An emotionally immature father may become angry because the punch caught him off guard and caused pain. He forgets this is a toddler and reacts by yelling and swearing. For the rest of the night, he avoids the toddler. No one considers how frightened the toddler is in that moment. The toddler may even look shocked, if someone is paying attention, and start crying in response to the outburst. I have heard parents describe their toddler’s tears as manipulation or selfishness. So no one bothers to check on the child. But that interpretation is inaccurate. No toddler understands they can hurt such a large adult. They are simply playing and interacting. What often happens next is that the father holds or plays with the toddler less. He gives them nicknames like “slugger” and offers little warmth or connection. The toddler continues trying to approach the father, but the interaction remains minimal. As the years pass, nothing changes. The child, now a tween, starts to isolate from their father. They do not share secrets. They do not seek advice. They resent that this person is their father because what kind of father treats their child like a stranger? What the parents see is an insolent child. They complain that the child does not talk or engage with them. Meanwhile, a younger sibling born a few years later receives more attention and affection. The father gives much of his energy to that child. They become best friends. This favouritism is witnessed by both parents, but the mother either cannot change the father’s behaviour or feels similarly herself. As a result, the oldest child becomes isolated, not just from the father, but from the family as a whole. How is it possible, knowing what happened, to believe this teen’s hurt, disguised as anger, does not make sense? I uncover incidents like this in my clients’ lives. These experiences help explain the teen’s pain, hopefully not only to parents and siblings, but more importantly to the teen. The teen is the most important person for whom the story must come together because, without understanding and feeling something for their own story, they will lack the agency to authentically be themselves with others. Both the parents and the teen may feel the original incident was insignificant and not worth remembering. However, look at the impact. There are countless moments like this in the lives of my clients. These experiences contribute to misunderstandings and ongoing suffering in the form of anxiety, depression, and chronic illness. What both parents and teens often fail to recognise is the impact of not understanding why they behave the way they do. How is social media affecting teen self-worth right now? In some ways, social media is a scapegoat because it is exceptionally good at exploiting many of the reasons people seek escapism. However, I want to be precise in how I describe what social media is doing. A “chicken and egg” phenomenon is occurring. For the student or person who already does not feel good enough, social media becomes an opportunity to amplify those feelings through comparison, bullying, manipulation, and self-harm, among other things. In the hands of someone struggling with self-worth, social media becomes another form of drug that can accelerate the shame spiral. In reality, social media is a distraction, much like food, exercise, achievement, or other coping mechanisms. What I try to help people understand is that they are often using social media to avoid feeling what they are actually feeling, some version of shame, worthlessness, loneliness, rejection, or a combination of these emotions. Unless you are mindful of how something or someone makes you feel, and curious about it, emotions can take over your body very quickly. We engage in behaviours such as scrolling social media to eliminate uncomfortable sensations, but we fail to recognise that these sensations are emotions. This lack of emotional awareness was demonstrated in the work of Brene Brown, who noted that the average person can identify only a small number of emotions. I ask people all the time what they do when they feel sad or anxious, and they tell me they never feel sad or anxious. Humans can experience hundreds of emotional states throughout a day, often several at the same time. So when someone tells me they never feel sad or anxious, I know it is not because they are being dishonest. It is because they are unaware. Ignorance, combined with shame about having emotions like sadness and not knowing what to do with them, creates a sense of helplessness. That helplessness can feel like weakness. The reason emotions are so complex is that we often experience more than one at a time. You have to be taught what to do with emotions, and most parents were never taught themselves. As a result, many people inherit a generational pattern of emotional unawareness, sometimes referred to as alexithymia. Social media did not create that problem, but it certainly capitalised on it. The vast majority of teens and adults were never taught how to question what they were feeling while scrolling through content designed to trigger comparison, self-criticism, and emotional reactivity. What is one simple way parents can improve communication with their teen? A.B.C. Always Be Curious. We are accusatory or sarcastic, but we are rarely genuinely curious. Even when we ask the question about why a teen did something, it comes out more as exasperation, not a desire to understand. Here’s the gag, if you understand how teens think, you know they often do not have an answer because something, an emotion, hit them in that moment and they performed a behavior, such as fidgeting or being silent, to keep them safe or distract from a random vulnerable thought in their head. Apropos of the sarcasm, there is tone. The tone makes curiosity a snide remark. Teens already have brains that perceive the adult face as mean or angry even when it is not, so to add a tone like, “What the hell did you do that for?” is too much for teens to have the confidence to be vulnerable enough to explain why they did something that might be rooted in not feeling cool enough, smart enough, or pretty enough. It takes radical amounts of vulnerability to admit we are feeling this way, so instead we use behavior like humor, people-pleasing, or being super smart or successful to hide the vulnerability. These feelings are rooted in the attachment to caretakers. You can’t develop shame on your own. It is always something that comes in our interaction with someone else. I mentioned that most parents are not taught how to understand emotion, and as a result, they form different types of attachment to their children. The main attachments are secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. The secure attachment is a caretaker who shows up consistently and reliably most of the time in an emotional way. The anxious attachment has a parent who inconsistently shows up emotionally, so we struggle to become the person who can get the caregiver to show up consistently to meet our needs. The avoidant attachment shows more signs of alexithymia. They do not understand emotion, so they tend to be aloof parents who display minimal, if any, emotion. They often show neglect in how they interact with others, including children and partners who struggle to bend over backwards for a crumb of emotional connection. Finally, the disorganized attachment has the disadvantage of having the child rely on a caretaker for their physical and emotional needs while being afraid of the caretaker's treatment towards them. As children, we blame ourselves for the relationship with our caretaker, and we never think there is something wrong with the caretaker. Even as these thoughts sneak in, we ruminate and forget the violent behavior through dissociation and confusion. It allows us to block out that someone is not safe so we can be cared for. We are children. We need a caretaker to survive. But, to be clear, it is to survive. It has nothing to do with any of that love and loyalty to family stuff. We are practical as children. We need adults to survive. Sadly, when we are not allowed to be a separate person, called individuation, who learns about ourselves, we maintain that childlike state with complete dependence on the caretaker. We place the caretaker's needs first and lose our separateness to be who they want us to be, which is enmeshment. This means despite being chronologically in their 20s or 40s, we can observe dependent or childlike behaviors, even using terms that one would use between a parent and child. Prince describes this beautifully in Kiss with his line, “Act your age, not your shoe size.” The inability to understand this concept of enmeshment confuses bystanders who watch the abused return to the relationship time and time again. The person is not just a partner, but a parent. So being emotionally curious allows us to discover concepts like attachment theory and shame, and we can use this to be curious and improve the attachment to our children so they are validated for who they are, not who someone needs them to be. What do you mean when you say, “validation is not permission”? We all have a part of us that can react to what is new or unfamiliar. For our safety, we want what is familiar. So when teens behave in ways that seem antithetical to their parents, parents can default to invalidating the teen by judging and/or criticizing their behavior. This shaming behavior of criticism and judgment by caretakers creates self-distrust and a poor caretaker-child relationship. This is the anatomy of an anxious or insecure attachment with caretakers. It makes the child have to trust the caretaker instead of themselves. If we want the teen to feel confident, they need only be curious about themselves so they can know themselves well. To do this, the teen needs a caretaker who can validate their experience. This concept always makes me think of Bruce Springsteen, who struggled in his relationship with his father. His dad wanted him to cut his hair short and be responsible by going into the service. It is his mom who bought him his first guitar with the money she made and encouraged Bruce to be himself. Still, despite her unconditional support, it was his dad’s approval that impacted him so much. It was Bruce’s inability to fully trust himself, still longing for his dad’s validation or approval, that created years of turmoil for him. So when Bruce wins his Academy Award for the song he wrote for the movie Philadelphia, the first thing he does is go home and place the award on the kitchen table as if to ask, now am I good enough for the choices I made about my life? Bruce had no idea that his dad’s disapproval was about his own dad’s disappointment in himself, and most likely seeing Bruce have the courage to do things despite not having his dad’s approval caused his dad so much suffering through the emotion envy, where we see something someone else has or can do and we dislike them for it. We want to sabotage it because we cannot or could not have it. Bruce absorbed his dad’s shame about his dad’s father-son relationship and led a life doing things that he thought would bring him approval. The truth is, had his dad realized how he was making Bruce feel, the way he felt as a kid, he most likely would have realized that he didn't need to say, “I permit you to be a singer-songwriter,” if he had anxiety about the chances he would be successful. But what Bruce’s dad could have done, which probably would have meant the world to a younger Bruce, was to validate Bruce’s choice. He could have said, “I see this means a lot to you, and I can see how hard you work at it and how much joy it brings you. I may not understand it, but I can absolutely see what it brings out of you. So keep at it.” Validation, without permission. What have you learned about the connection between shame and self-worth? Before I understood the difference between self-worth and self-esteem, I thought it was what the self-help books and inspirational speakers were saying about doing things that made you feel better when you felt bad. Those books focused on using language to focus and work hard through affirmations and cognitive change. I have learned a lot over the years and understand the power of shame. I will even admit that when I first heard Brené Brown eloquently define shame in her TED Talk, I got that it was feeling bad about yourself and naively thought I understood what shame was. Then, my kid said something to me that would change the textbook definition of shame to a visceral or body-changing definition, which clarified its connection to self-worth. They said, “Shame makes you feel like trash.” I felt this in my body. It made me instantly understand the aggressiveness to hide the shame and the behavior that was so determined to overcome it. It helped me understand why, in response to shame, people needed to escape with activities, food, or substances, and it helped me understand why it caused people to dissociate and collapse with the inability to do anything, even things that felt relatively simple. Self-worth is about understanding that you, yourself, are worthy of love and belonging. This means that you are not worth how you are treated by others. It is also not the same as narcissism or other emotionally unavailable coping mechanisms of using external gratification to make you feel good enough in minuscule moments, such as competition, grades, the school you get into, material possessions, or consumption. Inherent in self-worth is radical amounts of self-compassion. Notice this is a gift you give yourself and not one that you rely on others to give you. This was never explained to me like this when I was a new clinician. So, I could never understand why a teen, despite not wanting their parents to discover they were sexually active, would continue to be sexually active without birth control. I felt like if you don’t want them to know, then the worst way for them to find out is because you are pregnant. But teens would refuse until I understood the concepts of shame. Now, I know the desire for parental approval or validation made them abide by certain rules their parents had and then compartmentalize the behavior so they could have deniability. If I am not on birth control, then I am not the unlovable child whom my parents can’t trust and who doesn't listen. I developed way more compassion for why it was important to have the teen compartmentalize or place in different parts of their psyche who they were, potential self-worth, and who they wanted their parents to believe they were because of the longing for approval, self-esteem and shame. Self-compassion is the ability to be imperfect and still see yourself as worthy. It turns out we are more likely to complete a hard task if we are self-compassionate because we do not identify with the mistakes, meaning we don’t think that if we lose then we are a loser. This means we can look at what went wrong and learn from it in order to get it right. This is what Carol Dweck was explaining in her two modes of mindset, fixed and growth mindsets. We can look at relationships, academic and personal problems, political and social challenges, all with compassion, being able to discern the reality while having compassion for both sides. This is the crux of what makes it difficult to let go of our beliefs. We identify with them and feel we are bad for having believed them, so instead of letting them go, we cling tighter. This prevents us from healing from devastating events and circumstances by ensuring that our suffering matters. Well, we cannot heal when we believe we are broken or bad for choosing the wrong belief, such as the belief someone tells us is wrong, inaccurate, and even morally wrong. We don't hear that our beliefs are misinformed. We hear that we are the scum of the earth. We hear that we are trash. This is what makes us repel the information and compartmentalize our self-esteem about the choice by denial and aggressive pushback. We do this with all kinds of things, not just the history of the country, but the history of us. When I discuss someone’s childhood, the awareness that they were neglected as children is overwhelming at first, but they start to make sense to themselves, and as they do this, their percentage of self-compassion towards themselves rises first, and later, towards their abuser. This is the best of both worlds. Before the acknowledgement of their own worthiness, they only had understanding for the abuser, permitting them to be abused repeatedly. After increasing self-compassion, they have compassion for themselves as well, so they have no desire to change the other person as we do when we are in shame, but a willingness to accept the person as they are while choosing to engage or not, depending on how they are feeling. There was no more guilt or obligation to be someone the other person could abuse in order to make them happy. Sure, the other person might not have liked their independence, but there is no yelling or hatred or fighting this way. There is peace. So the amazing gift of imperfection, a term used by Brené Brown, is not just self-worth, but the inherent decrease in shame associated with it because of the inevitable self-compassion embedded in the words self-worth. It has been such an honor to walk people through this process. What is one message you hope every teen and parent remembers after reading this interview? My hope is that, despite the work necessary to change automated behaviors, everything we do is for a good reason, even if the behavior is not desired by us. We have the ability to emotionally learn and grow, even if we make the choice not to. So change is possible. Changing how you see your behaviors has a lot to do with it. It’s not just who you are, but what you learned to do in order to keep yourself safe. I’ve worked with kids on the spectrum or with diagnoses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as well as medical conditions like multiple sclerosis, irritable bowel syndrome, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes, and there has always been an ability to shift behaviors and emotional awareness when someone wants to. I don’t think all clinicians can do it, and that is based on people telling me they’ve worked with someone for years and didn’t realise they could feel so much better. I’m always sceptical of someone who makes big promises, I don’t often believe they can deliver. Here, I actually know what prevents outcomes, and I believe I’m really good at this type of change. So if you are willing to take a chance on yourself, I can authentically help you quiet the chatter in your head and feel better. My clients often wonder, after a month of work and they are starting to get it, what their life would have been like had they met me five years ago. If you are reading this article, reach out here and schedule a free consultation. You will never have to wonder, you can just start now. So if you’re ready, call or email for a free consultation. You literally have nothing to lose. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Adekemi Oguntala

Written by Stefania Leone, Jyotishi / Vedic Astrologer/ Advisor Stefania Leone is a Jyotishi /Vedic Astrologer with 40+ years of experience, blending deep spiritual insight with practical business acumen. She interprets birth charts as sacred maps of karma and dharma, guiding leaders and visionaries to align with purpose, clarity, and conscious growth. On June 1, 2026, Jupiter, the planet associated with expansion, wisdom, and collective growth, moves into Cancer, a sign connected to home, nourishment, family, and belonging. In Vedic astrology, this is considered one of Jupiter’s most powerful placements, amplifying themes tied to emotional security, caregiving, and the systems that sustain human connection. But this transit is not simply about comfort or sentimentality. It arrives during a period of global reorganisation, socially, economically, spiritually, and politically. As institutions fracture and public trust shifts, attention returns to what feels safe, rooted, and emotionally real. In Jyotisha, the Vedic “Science of Light,” planetary movements are understood as informational patterns influencing both individual and collective consciousness. Jupiter in Cancer expands whatever nurtures life, but it also magnifies the shadow side of protection: fear, tribalism, emotional reactivity, and attachment to the familiar. The question of this transit is not whether expansion will happen. It is what we choose to expand. Over the next year, we are likely to witness an intensified focus on housing, family systems, migration, food security, mental health, nationalism, caregiving, and community resilience. Leadership itself may begin shifting from dominance-based models toward protector and steward archetypes. This is a transit asking humanity to mature emotionally, to build systems that do not merely inspire, but sustain. Jupiter moves into Cancer June 1, 2026 to June 25, 2027. Expansion without emotional accountability becomes a parade. This transit insists on depth. At 15:33:33 on June 1, 2026, Jupiter leaves Gemini and enters Cancer, a transit that shifts collective frequency toward home, heart, and belonging. Light carries frequency; frequency carries information. Celestial placements are not just poetic metaphors. In Jyotisha, the Vedic “Science of Light,” planetary positions map recurring information patterns that play out across individual lives and societies. Each sign and planet is a frequency zone, and within those zones are multiple levels of expression shaped by cultural evolution and consciousness. Consider Mars in Aries, which is the case now. At a base frequency, it maps to conflict and battle. At higher frequencies, it channels decisive innovation and technological breakthrough. The same is true for Jupiter in Cancer. This is one of Jupiter’s exaltations, a placement that magnifies the themes Cancer rules: family, emotional security, nourishment, home, and collective belonging. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer Family, emotional security, nourishment, nationalism, housing, caregiving, and collective belonging are all themes connected to this placement. Astrologers often view this as one of Jupiter’s strongest placements because Cancer is traditionally considered Jupiter’s exaltation. We expect to see positive change. Why this matters now We are entering a geopolitical and cultural moment often described as the Age of Aquarius and the Age of Disclosure, a time when suppressed narratives surface and collective paradigms shift. Jupiter in Cancer brings expanded attention to the domestic and the emotional: who we call family, how we secure our homes, and how communities care for one another. That expansion can look nurturing or defensive, inclusive or protectionist, depending on the frequency we choose. Top ten macro patterns to watch Family and demographic shifts: Greater cultural emphasis on parenting, multigenerational living, fertility, and caregiving systems. Housing and real estate expansion: Renewed investment in homes, renovations, and community infrastructure. Policy focus on housing security. National identity and roots: Intensified conversations about homeland, heritage, and cultural preservation, sometimes surfacing as patriotism or border politics. Food, agriculture, and hospitality growth: Scaling of domestic food systems, local agriculture, and care-oriented service industries. Emotional politics: Leaders who embody protector or caregiver archetypes win hearts and influence. Mental health focus: Expanded resources for trauma recovery, family therapy, and community-based healing. Migration and refuge: Migration, displacement, and sanctuary debates become central to policy and public discourse. Water and coastal concerns: Heightened attention to oceans, flooding, water security, fisheries, and climate adaptation. Home-centered economies: Consumer and tech trends skew toward remote work, home spaces, and domestic innovation. Collective desire for safety: Cultural gravitation toward trusted networks, nostalgia, and emotionally reassuring narratives. How to use this transit personally Jupiter’s gift is expansion and opportunity. It removes obstacles, enlarges perspective, and amplifies what’s already present. During this cycle: Lean into family and community projects that enlarge emotional safety. Invest in home, domestic ventures, and practical infrastructure that stabilise your routine. Open to mentorship, healing work, and therapies that broaden emotional intelligence. Watch for opportunities to lead from a caretaker or protector archetype in business or civic life. Contextual note Saturn in Pisces during this period heightens spiritual responsibility. The combined field asks us not only to feel deeply, but to translate feeling into structurally responsible action. This is a time to cultivate grounded optimism. Use Jupiter’s uplift to build real-world, heart-centered systems that persist beyond charisma or hype. “When collective frequency shifts homeward, leadership that protects and heals will gain traction.” Follow me on Instagram, or visit my website for more info! Read more from Stefania Leone Stefania Leone, Jyotishi / Vedic Astrologer/ Advisor After a lonely traumatic spiritual awakening at the age of 7, Stefania began what has amounted to a lifetime of study in the areas of consciousness, metaphysics and holistic healing. The most profound and useful answers came through Jyotisha, the original and most accurate and true source of Astrology. Her mission is to bring Jyotisha mainstream in the west.

Written by Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist Lisa Forsberg is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and narcissistic abuse recovery specialist who combines deep clinical expertise with her own lived experience of healing from a toxic relationship. Her mission is to help others rediscover a life filled with peace, purpose, and possibility. If you have ever found yourself in the same painful relationship dynamic and wondered how you got there again, this article is for you. Clinical Hypnotherapist and Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Specialist Lisa Forsberg explains the hidden childhood blueprint behind narcissistic relationships, why understanding alone is rarely enough to break the pattern, and what real recovery actually looks like. What is narcissistic abuse? Narcissistic abuse is a form of emotional and psychological manipulation inflicted by someone with narcissistic traits, a partner, parent, friend, or colleague who uses control, gaslighting, intermittent affection, and emotional withdrawal to keep you small and off balance. The insidious thing about narcissistic abuse is that it often doesn't look like abuse, not from the inside and not from the outside. It often looks like a difficult relationship. A moody partner. A complicated family dynamic. Because it is so hard to name, it is even harder to heal from. Why narcissistic relationships can feel so strangely familiar Like so many of my clients, I came to hypnotherapy because I was the one seeking healing. For over ten years, I was in a relationship with someone I now recognise as a narcissist. A man who was charming and adoring at first, then explosive, unpredictable, and at times violent. Like so many women in these relationships, I stayed far longer than I should have. Not because I was weak, but because, even though I didn't realise this at the time, the pattern felt somewhat familiar. In fact, it felt like home. That's the piece most people miss when they look at someone in a toxic relationship and ask, "Why don't they just leave?" When you grow up around dysfunctional relationship dynamics, red flags don't look like red flags. They just look like flags. In my case, I had a mother who would often rage and then go silent for hours, sometimes days. We would wait it out, tiptoeing around the house until it passed, and then everyone would go back to acting like nothing had happened. My nervous system learned that this was simply what relationships looked like: tension, silence, emotional withdrawal, reunion. Repeat. So, when I met a man in adulthood who adored me, moved in quickly, and then began to explode, disappear, and return with declarations that I was his soulmate, I wasn't at all alarmed. In fact, I was comfortable. My subconscious mind recognised this pattern deeply. This is what I call the relationship blueprint, the internal map we develop in childhood that tells us what love is supposed to feel like. For many of my clients, that map was drawn in a household where love came with conditions, chaos, or control. It doesn't have to be overtly abusive to leave a mark. Sometimes it's a parent lost in grief, or one who drank but "wasn't violent, so it wasn't a big deal," and yet the children learned to stay quiet, stay small, and not upset anyone. That's the blueprint, right there. The moment everything shifted When I began working with a hypnotherapist, the shifts were rapid and profound. The biggest change was in my nervous system. I felt a deep, physiological settling I hadn't experienced before. As I continued the work, the light bulb moments started coming. It wasn't just my ex-partner. There was the boyfriend before him. The controlling boss. The friendship at university that left me always walking on eggshells. Of course, the penny eventually dropped. The pattern had begun all the way back in early childhood, with my mother. Once I could see it, I couldn't unsee it. I hadn't simply been unlucky in love. I had been unconsciously seeking out what felt familiar, in my body and in my mind. This is why, when a client now sits across from me and shares her story, I can say with complete honesty, "I know. I've been there too." Why so many women don't recognise narcissistic abuse In my clinic, the presenting issue is rarely the real issue. Many of the women who find their way to me have no idea that a history of dysfunctional relationships has anything to do with why they're there. They book in because they can't stop vaping, or they're drinking more than they'd like, or the anxiety has become unmanageable, or they simply cannot stop biting their nails. These feel like the problem. On the surface, they are. But as we begin to talk, other things quietly emerge. "My husband? That's a whole other story." "I haven't spoken to my mother in years." Often, within the safety of this very first session, something begins to shift. A dawning awareness that what they came in for may not be the whole story. Not about the vaping or the nail biting, but about the relationships that have been slowly eroding their sense of self, often for decades. The anxiety, the alcohol, the compulsive habits, these are not the problem. They are the coping mechanisms. Beneath them, almost always, is the long-term impact of narcissistic or emotional abuse. So why didn't they recognise it sooner? Often, it is because their experience is dismissed. By the relationship itself and by the world around them. The person they are with tells them they are too sensitive, that they are overreacting, that it never happened, or that they are imagining things. When they hear that often enough, they start to believe it. When they raise concerns with a friend, they are told "nobody's perfect" or "all relationships are hard." When they try to explain what's happening, people say "he had a difficult upbringing" or "but he's so lovely with everyone else." Well-meaning as it often is, the message from every direction is the same: minimise, normalise, move on. So, over time, they do. They begin to gaslight themselves. They shrink their own experience down to something manageable. They stop trusting what they feel. They carry on. This is especially true for women, like myself, who grew up with an emotionally unpredictable mother. There is a particular kind of loneliness in that experience because society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea. A difficult father, people can accept that. But a mother? People will say, "You can't feel that way about your mum," or "I've met your mum and she's lovely." So these women learn to doubt themselves from an early age, carrying that self-doubt right into their adult relationships, and often straight toward another narcissist or emotionally unavailable partner. Of course, not every client who walks through my door has a history of narcissistic abuse. But for those who do, having a space where the dots can finally be connected is often the beginning of everything. Why hypnotherapy creates lasting recovery from narcissistic abuse True recovery from narcissistic abuse, or any deeply embedded pattern of unhealthy relationships, isn't linear, and it isn't just about leaving. It's about what comes after. The slow and gentle process of coming back to yourself. This is where so many survivors struggle to move forward. If you have ever sat in a therapist's office, understood intellectually exactly why you make the choices you make, and then gone home and made those same choices anyway, you are not broken. You are experiencing the gap between the conscious and subconscious mind. Talk therapy is valuable, and understanding your story matters. But the subconscious mind, the part that holds your relationship blueprint, your trauma responses, and your deep-seated beliefs about what you deserve, doesn't speak in logic. It speaks in feelings, patterns, and physical sensations. This is why so many survivors of emotional abuse can say, "I know he was bad for me," and still feel the pull to go back, still find themselves drawn to the same toxic dynamic six months later. Knowing something intellectually and truly healing from it at a subconscious level are two very different things. Hypnotherapy bypasses the critical, analytical part of the mind and speaks directly to the subconscious, where the real programming lives. It's in this deeply relaxed, open state that we can gently access and rewrite the beliefs that were formed before you even had the language to question them, beliefs like "I have to earn love," "if I'm just good enough, he'll change," or "this is just what relationships are like." In my experience, the most profound shifts happen in a particular order. First, the body has to feel safe before the mind can do anything useful, and hypnotherapy creates that safety quickly and deeply. Then comes understanding, seeing the full picture of your patterns without shame or self-blame. Then the deeper work: rebuilding the belief that you are enough, reclaiming your power, and learning that you get to choose how you respond to the world now. Somewhere in that process, usually when a client least expects it, she begins to reconnect with the version of herself that existed before the dysfunctional relationship. The one who had opinions, interests, energy, and joy. She didn't disappear. She just went quiet to stay safe. That is the real destination of this work. Not just healing from what happened, but becoming so deeply in love with who you are that you would never again tolerate anything less than you deserve. When you change the blueprint, the building changes too. What we need to start teaching One of the most important conversations I keep coming back to is prevention. We need to do more to teach young people what a healthy relationship actually looks like. There are no school lessons on nervous system regulation, emotional boundaries, or how to recognise manipulative or narcissistic behaviour. Instead, we grew up on Hollywood movies, the dramatic breakup, the time apart, the passionate reunion at the airport. We genuinely thought that was what love looked like. The push and pull. The intensity. The longing. No wonder so many of us chased toxic relationships that felt like that. We need to start this conversation in high schools. What does a healthy relationship look like? What does it feel like in your body when something is wrong? How do you recognise the early signs of emotional abuse or narcissistic behaviour? These are not soft skills. They are essential life skills. Ready to break the pattern? If any part of this article resonated with you, if you've found yourself in the same type of relationship more than once, or if you've always felt like you were too much or not enough, I want you to know that it is not a character flaw. It is a pattern. Patterns can be changed. I know this because hypnotherapy changed my life and my relationships in every single way, and I now have the absolute privilege of walking my clients through that same transformation each and every day. If you are ready to understand your blueprint and rewrite it, I would love to hear from you. Reach out to book a discovery call and let's talk about what's possible for you. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lisa Forsberg Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist Known as The Healthy Hypnotherapist, Lisa Forsberg is one of Australia's leading specialists in narcissistic abuse recovery. A survivor of narcissistic abuse herself, Lisa brings both lived experience and deep clinical expertise to her work, creating a space where clients feel truly understood, often for the first time. She works with adults, teens, and children across Australia and worldwide, helping them heal from toxic relationships, rebuild their sense of self, and break free from repeating cycles. Lisa also mentors fellow hypnotherapists who want to work confidently in this deeply nuanced field.

Written by Neil Nathan Turner, Father, Life Coach, Instructor, Electrician Neil N. Turner is an RSE Electrician, Electrical Instructor, and the founder of Power Factor Coaching. Known as The ElectricalCoach, he utilizes his "Phase" system to help professionals rewire their careers for maximum efficiency and safety. Connect with Neil on LinkedIn and Facebook to learn more about staying grounded while making connections. When you pick up a set of tools for the first time, you are handed a blueprint. For a lot of people in the skilled trades, that blueprint feels pretty linear. You start an apprenticeship, you log your hours, you pass your exams, and you spend the next thirty years on the tools. It’s a noble, honest, and steady path. But what they don't tell you when you enter a trade is that a license isn't just a certificate of qualification for a specific job. It is a master key to an entire universe of untapped potential. The truth is, you never truly know where life will take you when you remain open, put in the raw equity of hard work, and inject a little bit of creativity into your craft. Work, at its highest level, isn’t just a series of repetitive physical tasks. It is an art form. Just like any great artist, a tradesperson has the power to look at their canvas, their skillset, and create something entirely unexpected. Beyond the tools: The creative pivot There is a common misconception that the skilled trades and creative thinking live on opposite sides of the brain. We tend to separate the analytical, technical builder from the fluid, artistic visionary. But look closer. A master electrician running intricate conduit runs, a carpenter framing a complex roofline, or a mechanic diagnosing an invisible electronic glitch, these aren't just technical executions. They require spatial intelligence, lateral problem-solving, and a deep sense of craftsmanship. The moment you start viewing your trade through a lens of creativity, the ceiling on your career completely vanishes. Getting your ticket, becoming a Red Seal professional, is your grounding. It’s your foundation. It proves you have the grit to master a highly technical, safety-critical discipline. But once that foundation is poured, what are you going to build on top of it? If you settle for only being on the tools because that’s what is expected, you might be leaving your highest output on the table. When you allow yourself to think outside the toolbox, your skills become modular. They can be repurposed into teaching, leadership, consulting, entrepreneurship, or media. The technical precision you learn on a job site can be reverse-engineered to optimize your entire life. Working smarter, not harder: Closing the efficiency gap We’ve all heard the old adage, "work harder." It’s practically the unofficial slogan of the industrial world. But continuous, uncalibrated hard work without strategy is just a fast track to burnout. It’s a low power factor, putting in massive amounts of apparent power but yielding very little actual, useful working power. The real art of work is learning how to work smarter. Working smarter means treating your energy, your time, and your career progression like a finely tuned distribution system. It’s about minimizing waste, streamlining your processes, and ensuring that every ounce of effort you expend is moving you toward a specific, high-value target. When you combine a strong work ethic with a strategic, creative mindset, you stop trading hours for dollars linearly. You start looking for leverage. How can you use your field experience to improve a system? How can you mentor the next generation? How can you integrate wellness, mindset, and peak performance into an industry that desperately needs it? By shifting your focus from pure physical exertion to a high-leverage strategy, you close the gap between where you currently are and where you are truly capable of going. The unpredictable journey of an open mind If you had told me years ago exactly where my journey would take me, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that is the beauty of remaining open. Opportunity rarely knocks on your door with a perfectly typed itinerary; it usually arrives disguised as a challenging project, an unexpected pivot, or a creative curiosity that you decide not to ignore. When you stay grounded in your core values and your technical competence, you create a safe zone from which you can take massive, calculated risks. You can "play big" because you know your foundation is solid. If you are entering a skilled trade today, or if you’ve been in the game for a decade and are wondering what’s next, challenge yourself to look past the immediate task in front of you. Don't look at a blueprint as a restriction; look at it as a starting point. Be creative with your new skillset. Write, teach, innovate, build businesses, create media, and design new systems. Live at 1.0 efficiency Your career is a dynamic circuit, and you are the operator. You can let the current flow down the path of least resistance, or you can intentionally wire it for maximum performance. Put in the hard work. Pay your dues on the tools, because that raw field experience is irreplaceable capital. But never let the tools define the limits of your mind. Stay open to the tangents, the creative detours, and the unexpected opportunities. When you fuse electrical precision with human creativity, you don’t just build a career. You create a masterpiece. Live at a power factor of η = 1.0 efficiency, maximize your output, and eliminate waste. You truly never know just how far a little bit of grit and a whole lot of imagination will take you. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Neil Nathan Turner Neil Nathan Turner, Father, Life Coach, Instructor, Electrician Neil N. Turner (RSE) is a seasoned Construction and Maintenance Electrician, Electrical Instructor, and certified Career Wellness and Life Coach. As the founder of Power Factor Coaching, Neil utilizes his proprietary "Phase" system, Grounding, Distribution, and Peak Load, to help tradespeople and professionals rewire their careers for high performance. With over a decade of experience in the field, and working as Foreman for major projects for OPG and Starbucks, Neil blends technical safety with personal development to help his clients stay grounded and live at 1.0 Efficiency. Connect with Neil on LinkedIn and Facebook to "Make the Connections" that matter.