A Psychic told me I have never experienced real love
For a moment I believed them
Hello my beloved community!
Can I talk to you about desire?
One of my favorite Buddhists, white lady Tara Brach, says that
Desire is the glue that holds the universe together
Healing our relationship to desire, and being able to acknowledge, verbalize, and celebrate our desires is key to living a life of joy, presence, and meaning.
You know, we talk about triggers, but we don’t talk enough (In my opinion) about Glimmers. Glimmers are little things that we see or experience that bring us joy and make us feel safe.
Taking note of our glimmers is so important. While there are a million infographics on the internet about self-regulation, our ability to observe ourselves and offer ourselves access to the unique things that bring us joy will create true long-term safety in our lives.
When we tend to ourselves with dedication, care, and compassion, we build self-trust and heal wounds of self-abandonment.
Building this foundation of self-knowledge and self-care practices can transform our lives profoundly.
I see so much content on the internet about manifestation, and I both love it and feel really frustrated by it.
I think it is so important to build our muscles for visions of the future and to celebrate these visions with ritual, but to make our dreams come true, it takes more than vision.
In the same way, a seedling needs water and heat to grow, our dreams need devotion, a loving, aligned community that will keep us accountable, and habits that we commit to that guide us toward our gleaming futures.
When we put effort into tending to positive change, and growth, we step closer to presence.
When we consistently follow our dreams, we allow our dreams to guide us, and inevitably, we re-build self-trust and heal from self-betrayal.
I truly believe this, and my Barbie pool feels like a bit of evidence for this theory.
In my opinion, life is brutal. No matter how much we manifest, how much money we make, how beautiful look, or how comprehensive our skin routine is, nothing will save us from life. We will inevitably experience grief and pain beyond our imagination, and we will also experience beauty and joy beyond our imagination. In the end, our ability to heal and our capacity to step towards presence, and each other, is within our control.
My course, New Cycles, is designed to create a loving container for us to do this work together, collectively. With honesty, we will get comfortable with our desires, tend to our wounds, and take baby steps towards creating transformative change in our lives .
I want you to join us (If you want to join us) !
The cohort starts September 11th and goes until December 4th. It is on Mondays from 11am PST to 1pm PST.
If you are interested, I strongly encourage you to join the waitlist! I have already sent the sign-up page out to the first round on the waitlist (along with a juicy discount). I’ll send another round of emails ( and coupon codes ) out early next week.
You can also join the waitlist for the 2024 cohort if you are interested in joining but not this round! You can sign up for that here:
Finally, this email is super long and I am proud to say that I have finally achieved my goal of sending out emails once a week! If that is too many emails for your inbox I understand, and encourage you to un-subscribe!
If you would still like to remain engaged with my work, but would like quarterly/yearly emails, you can sign up here:
You won’t believe what my psychic said to me!!!
Have you ever met with a psychic?
While I regularly book sessions with different types of healers and will watch a tik tok tarot reader, I have never actually had a session with a psychic.
This past spring a particular psychic caught my eye. I learned about their work because they have a podcast where they talk about the Real Housewives, and I found it to be insightful.
People may not know this about me, but I am Bravo fan.
Bravo is problematic, and the extensive content they release fascinates me.
I especially love the reunions that happen on Bravo shows. The idea that a camera might follow us around for several months, that footage would be edited into 20 hours, played back, and then me and everyone in the footage would come together with an external facilitator to talk about it is irresistible to me as a conflict navigator, but also as a conflict-prone human.
There are so many conversations I wish I could have with people I love, but with whom I can’t share space due to a lack of collective accountability.
Often, I or the other person lack the capacity and support to have the conversations we would need to move through repair.
Even coordinating with an external facilitator is outside of our capacity.
So Bravo and the reunions are very seductive to me. There are resources, a process, and binding contracts with the participants of Bravo reality shows that require them to be present for a reunion.
This has allowed for fascinating moments, like the Season 10 Real Housewives of Orange County Reunion, where Vicky Gunvalson admits to creating false medical documents to support a storyline about her lover having cancer.
At the center of the reunion is Andy Cohen, a problematic white gay man, and an undeniably talented facilitator.
May he remind us that we all have the opportunity to use our gifts for good or evil.
Anyways, Back to the Psychic
I appreciated their nuanced insight when it came to the housewives, and I reached out to them about recieving a personal reading.
When I spoke with them I realized that they were out of my budget for the spring, but intended to book a reading with them this fall. Then in July I was listening to their podcast and I learned that they were creating a group container, so I applied. As a part of the application process, I was invited to schedule an hour with them to get to know each other and discuss the course.
I had a feeling that it might be out of my budget, but pay plans exist and I was excited to finally talk to this person whose work I had been following for so long.
It was immediately awkward.
It reminded me of the time I met David Sedaris when I was in college. I had heard his voice so often while listening to This American Life. Meeting him in person was something I logically wanted to do, but when it happened, I felt extremely uncomfortable.
I now have the language of parasocial relationships to describe the unsettling juxtaposition of a private intimate relationship with someone’s voice or content and the real-life experience of relating to them.
All that to say, that when I met the psychic over zoom I was meeting them in their full expression of humanity.
It was exciting, a little bit overwhelming, and most of all awkward, LOL.
The psychic began by asking me about myself and my work, and they quickly pointed out a theme of non-duality. They asked about my gender identity and why I wasn’t currently in a relationship.
The phrasing of the question startled me, the assumption that not being partnered indicated a difficulty or an issue.
After listening to me share my family story (because we know that the story does not start with me, ok?!?), and my own journey with love, the psychic turned to me and said :
“So you’ve never experienced deep intimacy and safety at the same time?”
These words cut deep, and simultaneously ignited and internal sense of fear and desperation. “no, no of course I have,” The words sputtered out as I felt my throat grow narrow and my breathing become labored.
In that moment, I felt disbelief and panic. I knew this assertion couldn’t be true. The psychic invited me to share more, to offer an experience that would help them better understand my circumstances. I shared what came to mind, and they offered a condescending smile and began to explain how what I shared supported their theory.
Defeated and uncomfortable, I interrupted their explanation and hastily agreed: “Yes, I have never experienced deep intimacy and safety simultaneously.”
Immediately, I felt sadness and shame in my body, and angry with myself.
How did I let myself live 32 years without prioritizing feeling love safely?
In that moment, I was reminded of truth I have lived a million times :
There is nothing more humbling than being a survivor.
Surviving intimate partner violence is a symptom of a larger legacy of violence that I was born into. I can trace this legacy of violence through my family members and towards something greater in the collective: the violence of colonization, the violence of displacement, and even further back, the violence of wealth and power inequality, the violence of patriarchy.
Ultimately, while this legacy of violence is bigger than me and beyond my control, I am the one that lives with the day- to- day consequences.
It means that sometimes, in my personal life, I will recreate abusive dynamics without realizing it, until harm has occurred, and it’s too late for the relationship to be salvaged. Often these dynamics are clear to everyone around me, except for me, and when I realize the truth, I feel embarrassed, humiliated, and heartbroken.
A wise friend once comforted me as I was in the depths of humiliation and shame, and offered me a gift through words:
“You can feel humiliated or you can feel humility. Both involve being human.”
Before my wise friend told me this, I hadn’t thought a lot about humility, but this moment changed me, and I realized that humility and affirming my human nature is a powerful antidote to my crippling perfectionism.
There is actually a quote in Avatar, The Last Airbender that mirrors this sentiment:
“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but the source.
True humility is the only antidote to shame.”
-Uncle Iroh
By creating a story about my experiences of intimacy, the psychic not only triggered my many feelings of loss, grief, sadness, and shame related to surviving violence, but also ignited my enduring hunger for connection, desire, and intimacy.
For many years, I could not even articulate my desires because the thought of feeling them and being unable to meet them
—the thought of being disappointed—
felt so unbearably painful, that it was easier for me to avoid my desires and feelings altogether.
I know I am not alone in feeling this way or employing this strategy. Recently, it has given me great comfort to know that at any given time, many people, in various life circumstances, feel lonely and wish to feel differently. We are our own invisible community, all in different environments and circumstances, longing for connection.
All this to say, I disagree with the psychic.
I have experienced real, true, deep, safe intimacy multiple times over. I know it to be true, and I don’t need to prove myself or my experiences to anyone. That even if my experiences of intimacy were imperfect, even if later in the relationship the dynamics shifted to something unsafe, even if the relationship is no longer happening, it doesn’t invalidate the experience as it happened. Multiple truths can exist, we can hold complexity.
I recognized after the call that the psychic was motivated to construct a narrative about my deficiency of love to motivate me to enroll in their group container. I can still remember the moment after the call when I knew this person and the container were not the right fit for me, but feeling torn apart, desperate and anxious. On one hand, I knew the program wasn’t the right fit, but on the other hand, I desperately desire safe love and connection, and at that moment it felt like saying yes to this program would be the pathway to safe love.
I am so grateful for my friends (all of whom encouraged me to consider the source) and my own practices of self regulation and self reflection that allowed me to pause, sit with my feelings, and call forth a deeper truth.
When I look back at the conversation with the psychic, I can see that love and connection are not things we can control or force, although we may try. I know that I have experienced deep intimacy and safety because I value and prioritize those things. I create the conditions in my life to experience those things daily, which is also why I was so easily manipulated and dysregulated by the narrative that I have never experienced those things.
It was my desire that left me vulnerable to manipulation
this is actually why I started the newsletter with desire. Because I ultimately believe desire is a gift.
It is simultaneously true that our capacity for desire, just like our capacity for love, can leave us vulnerable, but that’s just the way life goes I guess.
I love this newsletter - so many gems! Plus your writing is 🔥& I heart the pics!!! 💓
I met David Sedaris, too! I felt super awkward because I was star struck so he asked me several mundane questions. Then he signed my copy of Barrel Fever, “Shera, it was nice to finally meet you.” 😭
Wow that's awful, I disagree too!