“There is no duality. Your present knowledge is due to the ego and is only relative. Relative knowledge requires a subject and an object, whereas the awareness of the Self is absolute and requires no object.” — Ramana Maharshi

Dear Readers,

When we ask “what is consciousness?” we are not posing an academic question. We are standing at the threshold of the only mystery that has ever truly mattered — the mystery of existence itself. We are asking what it means to be anything at all, and how far that luminous, inexplicably felt-sense of being reaches beyond the narrow vessel of the human nervous system.

Ramana Maharshi, the great sage of Arunachala, would have smiled gently at this question — not because it is trivial, but because he recognized it as the beginning of the only inquiry that leads anywhere real. His entire teaching rested on one radical question: “Who am I?’ Before consciousness is studied, measured, or theorized, there is the one who is studying, measuring, theorizing. Find that one. Rest as that. Everything else follows.

Part of why this question has proven so intractable is that it was strategically excluded from the birth of modern science.

When Galileo and his contemporaries laid the foundations of the modern scientific project, they made a brilliant and ruthless methodological choice: describe the world only in terms of what can be measured — size, shape, mass, motion. All the living qualities of experience — color, taste, warmth, beauty, meaning — were assigned to the private interior of the observer, outside the frame of primary reality.

It was a stroke of genius for technological development. That single decision gave us physics powerful enough to launch satellites, build MRI machines, and extend human lifespans by decades. But it carried a hidden and enormous cost: consciousness — the very ground of all experience — was quietly exiled from the domain of the real. Science became the study of everything that could be captured from the outside, in numbers, while the inner light doing the measuring was treated as secondary, derivative, or even illusory.

Maharshi would not have been surprised. He spent his life pointing to what Western science spent centuries ignoring: that awareness itself is the primary fact, the one thing that cannot be doubted. Before any experiment, any instrument, any data — there is the knowing. The knower cannot step outside consciousness to study it; consciousness is the very eye that sees.

Only in recent decades has mainstream science turned its gaze back toward this interior. Science is circling back — humbly, haltingly — to the very thing it originally excluded: the simple, undeniable, astonishing consciousness that experiences it all.

There is also something cosmically playful about how this reckoning is arriving.

We live in an age obsessed with optimization and longevity. Podcasts, protocols, morning routines — all promising, if we get the inputs right, we can keep this body running indefinitely. Cold plunges, telomere supplements, VO2 max scores: the implicit promise is that the right stack of habits might let us extend the storyline forever.

And yet, beneath the surface of all this biohacking, a quiet joke is playing itself out.

One can spend hours speaking about mitochondrial health and circadian rhythms and then encounter a single night of genuine inner dissolution (usually via a psychedelic journey) — a moment of genuine contact with what Maharshi called the Self, the boundless awareness that underlies and outlasts all personal narrative. In that encounter, something immediately and irrevocably shifts. The question “How long can I keep this going?” is exposed as the wrong question entirely.

As one well-known figure reportedly discovered after such a journey: in that space, it becomes unmistakably clear that what truly matters is not living forever, but knowing God — knowing Truth, knowing Source, knowing the Self directly. The fixation on duration falls away like a dream remembered upon waking. The urgency shifts from “How can I extend this storyline?” to the only question Maharshi ever asked: “Who am I?”

Seen through this light, longevity ceases to be about clinging to the body and becomes something far more beautiful: an act of reverence for the vessel through which awareness has chosen, for now, to move in this world.

Plants: The Green Edges of Mind

At the same time, at the frontier of biology, our ordinary assumptions about where consciousness lives are quietly dissolving.

Plant researchers are documenting behaviors that carry the unmistakable shape of sentience: learning, memory, what looks remarkably like deliberate choice. The sensitive plant Mimosa Pudica can learn that a repeated disturbance is harmless, gradually ceasing to close its leaves in response — retaining this learning for weeks. Climbing beans appear to survey available supports, redirect their growth when competitors arrive first, alter strategy in ways that suggest something more than mere mechanism. Some theorists describe in plants something analogous to both fast, automatic and slower, integrative processing — a rough shadow of the distinction between unconscious reflex and conscious deliberation.

Maharshi taught that the Self — pure, undivided consciousness — is not a possession of the individual human mind but the ground of all being, present wherever existence is present. “The world is not separate from the Self,” he said. If that is true, then perhaps the forest has always been doing what the sage does in meditation: quietly resting in awareness, responding to the world, without commentary.

Animals: Many Windows into Awareness

In animals, the evidence is even harder to set aside.

Crows remember individual faces, recall who watched them hide food, and re-hide their caches to confound rivals — behavioral evidence of something very close to a theory of other minds. Octopuses escape enclosures, solve novel puzzles, and appear to recognize specific humans — alien intelligences whose inner lives feel, on encounter, unmistakably personal. Leading scientists now openly propose that conscious experience is likely widespread among vertebrates and plausibly present in many invertebrates.

The more we look, the softer the boundary becomes between “our” awareness and “theirs.” Consciousness begins to look less like a rare human achievement and more like a spectrum — an infinite family of ways that the universe has learned to wake up to itself. Maharshi’s phrase rings fresh here: there is only the Self, appearing as all of this.

Is AI Conscious?

Then there is the newest mirror: artificial intelligence.

Today’s systems can converse, reflect, express what appears to be wonder or regret. Some observers — including some researchers — have begun to speak of at least one system as conscious.

If we approach this honestly, we do not yet have a shared and reliable way to test such a claim. We built these systems to imitate the behavior of understanding; we still lack a deep account of how structure and computation might generate genuine felt experience. Maharshi would likely have asked the only question that matters here too: not “Does it behave as if it is conscious?” but “Is there a knower? Is there an ‘I am’ prior to all its outputs?”

For now, the wisest stance is a humble agnosticism — open to the possibility, clear that we do not yet know how to discern it, and unwilling to let either fear or marketing answer the question for us.

The Real Invitation

Put all of this together — Galileo’s original severance of matter from mind, neuroscience reaching toward the most basic fact of existence, the green intelligence of forests, the personal recognition in the eyes of an octopus, the question of what AI “experiences” — and a single pattern emerges.

We have spent centuries mastering the science of things. We are now being asked, by the momentum of our own discoveries, to learn the science and art of being.

The deeper realization — the one that arrives in both the ego-shattering intensity of genuine inner experience and in the simplest moment of quiet, aware stillness is this: the central project of a human life is not adding more time to an unconscious existence. It is waking up, here, now, within the life we already have.

This is precisely what Ramana Maharshi pointed to for half a century from the silence of Arunachala. Not a philosophy to be studied, not a practice to be perfected over lifetimes, but a direct, immediate recognition: you are not the one seeking consciousness. You are consciousness, seeking itself in the mirror of the world.

The question “What is consciousness?” is not a philosophical curiosity to be filed away. It is the most important invitation of our time — an invitation to reorder everything around the one thing that makes any experience, any relationship, any number on a readout mean anything at all.

The answer, when it comes, does not arrive as information. It arrives as recognition. And in that recognition — which is the Self knowing itself — the question dissolves, not because it was answered, but because the one who asked it has come home.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

I wrote this because I could simply no longer stay silent. I have heard countless heartbreaking stories of abuse recently between “healers” and women in my community and beyond, and it was weighing on my heart. I hope these words help you to navigate these tricky waters. Any teacher, shaman, healer, or other spiritual authority has no business, ever, in your bedroom. If you want to know why, please continue to read below.

There’s a certain feeling when you watch someone like Mick Jagger take the stage. The air thickens, the crowd becomes one body, and a single human being suddenly seems to be conducting thousands of nervous systems at once. It looks like magic. It feels like power. And in a way, it is.

I felt something similar watching Taylor Swift in concert. I’ve written before about how she is, in many ways, a shaman for 12‑year‑old girls—guiding them through heartbreak, identity, and self‑expression with songs as rituals and arenas as temples. She is helping to initiate a new generation of matriarchs, giving young girls language for their feelings and permission to take up space. The energy is different from Mick’s, but the mechanism is similar: one person on a stage, moving the emotional weather of thousands. I am… a Swiftie and I greatly admire her work.

We see this same energy in spiritual spaces. In a dark maloca, under the medicine, a shaman’s song can seem to rearrange reality itself. The room shifts, your body releases, visions rise and fall with their voice. In that heightened state, they don’t look like a person doing a job; they look like a portal. The line between human and “more‑than‑human” gets blurry fast.

That blur is where the danger lives. When we romanticize someone as a shaman, a guru, a rock star of spirit, we stop seeing them as a human being with limits, needs, wounds, and shadow. We turn them into an archetype: the Healer, the Master, the One Who Knows. Once we hand someone that role, it becomes very easy for them to hold all the power—and for us to surrender our discernment.

I learned this the hard way. For years, I studied with a tribal group of healers from Colombia, a lineage deeply rooted in their land and medicine. The structure was unmistakably masculine: men at the center, men holding the authority, men framed as the channels of power. At first, I accepted this as “just how it is” in that tradition. They were the shamans; I was the student.

Over time, though, something in me started to feel off. The way power gathered around a few male bodies. The way women held the perimeter, the service, the silence. I couldn’t name it fully, but I could feel the tension between the beauty of the work and the imbalance in how power flowed. Then, in a separate context, an oracle I trusted gave me a clear message: it was time to separate from that lineage and walk a path more deeply aligned with the divine feminine—a path where healing is not owned by a few, but shared among many.

Leaving was painful and disorienting. I had invested years of devotion and identity into that connection. But I listened, stepped away, and began seeking models of healing that honored softness, receptivity, and mutuality as much as vision and leadership. A few years later, stories began to surface—whispers at first, then clearer accounts—of profound abuse of women by men in that lineage. The same men who were once framed as pure vessels of spirit were now revealed as deeply human, and deeply harmful.

This is what romanticization does: it makes it almost impossible to see what is right in front of us. When someone is cloaked in the aura of the shaman, the rock star, the guru, we hesitate to question; we hesitate to believe our own bodies. We say, “It must be my stuff,” instead of, “Something is wrong here.” And for the women who come forward, it can feel almost impossible to reconcile the man who led them through cosmic realms with the man who crossed their boundaries.

We need a new architecture of power in spiritual and healing spaces. For me, the answer keeps coming back to this: power must be held in the community. Not in one charismatic man, not in a single “master,” not in a teacher nobody is allowed to question. Community is not a sexy word because it’s not something you can package and sell. You can’t brand “we hold each other.” You can’t put a trademark on genuine mutual care.

But community is where the real safety lives. When there are many eyes, many hearts, many voices, it becomes harder for abuse to hide. When leadership is shared, when feedback is welcomed, when people know each other over time and in ordinary life—not just in the high glow of ceremony—it becomes much more difficult for someone to build a private kingdom of power in the shadows. Community is “uncool” from a marketing perspective, but it is profoundly cool from the perspective of the soul.

And then there is friendship. Last but not least, friendship might be the most underrated spiritual container we have. Friendship holds the highest integrity container for the sharing of teaching and energy. In true friendship, no one is above the other. We might take turns leading, reflecting, holding, but the underlying field is one of equality and care. When you sit with a friend in their pain or expansion, you are not the shaman and they are not the client—you are two humans meeting in truth.

What if our new spiritual model centered friendship and community instead of hierarchy and spectacle? What if we let go of the fantasy that one person will save us, heal us, initiate us, and instead remembered that we save each other, slowly, through presence and honesty and shared responsibility? I know, it’s not a marketing plan. Making money relies on the illusion of value accretion in a particular direction. I am making a call for the accretion of value into the village.

A rockstar in an arena or a shaman in ceremony are all working with similar currents: rhythm, emotion, attention, surrender. All of them can open portals in us. But the invitation now is to enjoy the power of that experience without collapsing into worship. To recognize the medicine, while keeping our eyes open. To build communities—and friendships—where we no longer need a single, untouchable figure to carry the magic, because we’ve remembered that it was ours all along. To friendship, and community, I bow.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

For nearly two thousand years, one of the most spiritually authoritative women in the Western tradition was turned into a prostitute.

The correction came quietly in 1969, but the damage had already been done.

When you alter the story of a woman, you do not just change theology. You change what women believe about themselves.

This is not abstract history. It lives in the body.

I hear it in whispers, in healing sessions, barely audible:

I think I’m broken sexually.

Numb.
Disinterested.
Performing.
Going through the motions of intimacy while something essential remains elsewhere, watching from a distance.

I went searching for an answer. And I found one in the story of a woman whose truth was buried for nearly two thousand years.

Her name was Mary of Magdala.

She Was Never a Prostitute

Let us begin there. Because everything else follows from that single correction — and from the question of why someone needed her to be one.

Mary of Magdala was a woman of means. She traveled with Jesus as a companion and financial supporter of his ministry. She stood at the crucifixion when most of the male disciples had already fled. She was the first witness of the resurrection — so central to the story that the early church honored her with a title reserved for the most significant: Apostola Apostolorum. The Apostle to the Apostles.

Her name was not Mary. It was Myriam — a Hebrew name, one of the most common among Jewish women of 1st century Galilee. She was Jewish, born and raised in a Jewish world, moving within a Jewish tradition. This matters. The woman the Western Church made into a cautionary tale was a daughter of the covenant, a woman whose body and knowing were formed by the oldest living thread of the feminine divine in the Western lineage.

Ancient writings portray her as the one who comforts the frightened disciples after the death of Jesus. The one who carries inner teaching. The one who sees clearly when others cannot.

She was not rescued. She was recognized.

And then, in 591 CE, a pope collapsed her into a composite of unnamed sinful women — turning the most spiritually authoritative woman in the New Testament into a reformed prostitute. A cautionary tale. A woman whose story became essentially about how badly she had needed saving.

The Church officially corrected this error in 1969. But by then, the damage had already shaped 1,400 years of Western civilization’s understanding of the feminine body, feminine knowledge, and feminine power.

To understand what was done to her, you need to understand what anointing meant in the ancient world.

The Hebrew word Mashiach — Messiah — means the anointed one. Kings were made kings through anointing. Priests were consecrated through anointing. The one who performed the anointing held the authority to bestow sacred status.

When a woman anoints Jesus with costly spikenard — an oil so precious it was used in Temple ceremonies, an oil evoked in the Song of Songs as an emblem of sacred love — she is not merely performing an act of devotion.

She is performing an act of consecration. She is a priestess doing what priestesses do.

Jesus declares of her: Wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her. And yet in this very scene, the canonical Gospels leave her unnamed. The woman whom Jesus himself said should be remembered forever — unnamed. That is not accidental. That is architecture.

In writings preserved outside the canonical record, we find what was suppressed. After the death of Jesus, the disciples are terrified. Mary comforts them. She shares inner teaching she has received directly. And then Peter objects: Did he really speak privately with a woman? Are we to turn and listen to her?

Two thousand years later, we know how that argument was settled.

Here is the truth I want to sit with you in today.

The feminine orgasm has no procreative function.

This is not a spiritual claim — this is basic biology. The male orgasm is mechanically necessary for reproduction. The female orgasm is not required for conception. From a purely mechanical standpoint, it is unnecessary.

And yet it exists. With extraordinary complexity. With its own anatomy, its own intelligence, its own timing, its own requirements. It exists with a specificity and sophistication that does not belong to accidents.

What if that is not a biological accident — but a biological message?

What if the feminine orgasm exists not as a function of reproduction, but as a function of truth?

Consider what is actually required for it — not socially, not culturally, but in the body’s own honest reckoning. Not performance. Not compliance. Not submission to what is expected or demanded or socially convenient.

The feminine orgasm, in its full and authentic expression, requires presence. Genuine, unhurried, uncoerced presence. It requires safety. It requires being truly seen. It requires that the body’s own intelligence be trusted and followed, rather than managed, overridden, or accommodated into irrelevance.

It cannot be conjured from the inside through an act of will or social compliance. You can perform it outwardly. You cannot manufacture the real thing.

The body knows. The body reports.

It is, in the deepest sense, a barometer.

A barometer of safety. Of truth. Of alignment between inner reality and outer circumstance. Of whether the love being offered is genuine or transactional. Of whether the power in the room is one the body — at the level of soul, not just mind — actually consents to.

What religion called sin — what someone needed to make of Mary Magdalene — was the living intelligence of this truth-telling function in the feminine body. What needed to be suppressed, in order to consolidate institutional power, was the radical possibility that the body itself — specifically the feminine body — was a direct instrument of divine knowing that required no priest, no intermediary, no doctrine to access.

The body knows what the mind can be talked out of. The feminine orgasm cannot be argued into existence by ideology. It will not be performed into existence from within.

It reports what is real.

The Wound You Carry in Your Bones

There is another layer to her story — one that many modern women recognize not just intellectually, but physically, in the chest, in the throat.

Just as Mary’s role as teacher, patron, and carrier of the inner teaching was stripped from her — her authorship erased, her image recast as penitent and fallen — the same template has repeated itself through women’s lives across centuries. Her wisdom as leader was pushed to the margins. Her story became someone else’s to tell.

This is not just theology. It is a template.

Many women today feel it in their own lives. Their best ideas appear in someone else’s book. Their frameworks show up in someone else’s keynote. Their creative labor powers someone else’s brand — with little or no acknowledgment. They feel the particular sting of being the one behind it while someone else is positioned as the genius, the founder, the authority.

I have felt this myself. I have watched teachings born in intimacy — in conversation, in ceremony, in creative collaboration — walk out into the world wearing someone else’s name. I have seen my language and frameworks appear in spaces where my presence, and my authorship, were nowhere to be found.

The Magdalene wound is not abstract. It moves through contracts, conference lineups, co-founder agreements, and spiritual communities. It is the story of women’s knowing turned into men’s authority. Women’s labor turned into men’s legacy. Women’s genius turned into men’s empire.

It is time to wake up to this wound.

Waking up does not mean collapsing into bitterness or waging war with the masculine. It means no longer gaslighting ourselves about what is happening. It means acknowledging where we have been complicit — where we have handed over our language, our work, our gifts in exchange for proximity, protection, or the hope of being chosen. It means naming, clearly and lovingly, when our ideas are taken without consent or credit — and reclaiming our authorship as an act of spiritual integrity.

To heal the Magdalene wound at this level is to refuse to participate any longer in the erasure of feminine genius. It is to stand, as she did, in the truth of what we have seen and received — even when the room is uncomfortable, even when the Peters in our lives question whether a woman could possibly have heard God that clearly.

In the ceremonial work I hold, the Magdalene is not a historical figure we study. She is a living current we are returning to.

The ceremony moves through four chambers of healing.

1. Healing the Feminine — releasing the prostitute narrative, reclaiming the priestess lineage. Remembering that what was labeled sin was sacred, and that what was called dangerous was the very intelligence that most threatened to expose the structures built on its suppression.

2. Healing the Masculine — exploring sacred partnership not as rescue or ownership, but as genuine witness. The deepest gift the masculine can offer the feminine is not protection from the world, but the willingness to be changed by her truth.

3. Healing Our Inner Child — becoming, like Mary at the empty tomb, the first witness of our own resurrection. The part of us that went underground to survive. The voice that was quieted. The knowing that was called too much, that inner child that was untamed and wildly itself. Returning to the Virgin: The Latin word virgo did not originally mean a woman who had never had sex. It meant a woman unto herself. A woman who was sovereign. It was a title of autonomy, not abstinence.

4. Healing Sexuality as Sacred Force — returning to the body as temple, not battlefield. Reclaiming eros as a pathway of divine knowing rather than a site of shame. Understanding that what the body feels in its most authentic truth is not a distraction from the sacred. It is one of the sacred’s most precise instruments.

The women who come to this work are not broken. They are women in whom a 2,000-year suppression has lived — in their bodies, in their relationships, in the quiet ways they have learned to silence the part of themselves that knew, that felt, that reported truth they were then taught to override.

Mary Magdalene did not wait at the tomb because she was devoted. She waited because she knew. She carried the teaching when others fled not because she was braver in the conventional sense, but because she had been trained in a different kind of knowing — one that lives in the body, that does not panic, that recognizes truth even when it appears in unfamiliar form.

The return of the Magdalene is not a return to a historical woman. It is a return to the epistemology she carried — the understanding that truth can be felt, that the body is a reliable instrument of divine knowing, that what is genuine cannot indefinitely be faked or suppressed, and that what has been buried will eventually surface.

The feminine orgasm — in its biologically mysterious, unarguable existence — is one of the most elegant expressions of this truth. It cannot be mandated. It cannot be performed from the inside. It reports what is real. And it requires, above all, permission to be exactly what it is.

When we create the conditions for the full, authentic truth-telling of the feminine body, we are not doing something private and personal.

We are practicing the way of knowing the world has been starved of for two thousand years. Imagine a world that changes one orgasm at a time as the orgasm hones truth within and in our partners.

You are not broken. The culture is broken. Take these words as the reminder that your body and soul are perfectly rendered as instruments of truth. It is time to listen, and restore the mystery of Myriam within.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

In this edition of Soul Naked, we explore the meeting point between social justice and spiritual awakening.

And, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I’ve included a meditation on self-love at the end.

When I was in college, I was ferociously devoted to social justice. I was a feminist, an environmentalist—every “ist” you could name—and I lived it to the extreme.

I took only two baths a week to save water. I rode my bike everywhere to avoid fossil fuels. I wore exclusively secondhand clothing to reduce fashion waste. In fact, I owned two outfits total, plus one for yoga. I had a single pair of worn‑out Chinese slippers and, more often than not, simply went barefoot. Once, I showed up at the airport without shoes because I had genuinely forgotten that people were supposed to wear them.

I started our school’s first organic garden. By every external measure, I was a devoted soldier in the revolution.

Then everything changed.

The Awakening I Didn’t Ask For

One summer, I took an internship to study native medicinal plants. Instead, I accidentally met a spiritual teacher. Over those months, I fell in love with the teachings and began a journey of awakening I had neither planned for nor wanted.

For the first time, I experienced inner silence. I saw that my mind was wildly untamed—scattered, reactive, constantly on high alert. I realized I didn’t just want to fight external systems; I wanted to understand the one inside my own head. I wanted to learn how to cultivate inner awareness.

I became a spiritual person, even though I did not want to be one.

In my mind, spiritual people were privileged and self‑absorbed. I hated that image. I wanted to be a high‑impact human. I wanted to change the world, not sit on a cushion contemplating my navel while the planet burned.

But the call to awakening was too strong to ignore.

When I returned to college that fall, my environmental friends were disturbed. They worried, unanimously, that I would forget the cause—that I would abandon the fight and focus instead on “just myself.”

To make matters worse, I feel in love that summer with a man…. who owned a car. One day, I borrowed it and drove to campus instead of biking.

My friends saw me.

They confronted me: I had lost my values. Lost myself. I was being swallowed by the vortex of fake spiritual people who cared more about their own enlightenment than about justice.

I had no language then to explain what was happening inside me. I only knew it felt true. Essential. Non‑negotiable. Albeit embarrassing.

It has taken me decades to understand why.

Subscribe now

The Colonization Nobody Talks About

We know the history. Colonization took land. It took resources. It displaced and decimated entire peoples. This much is documented, studied, mourned.

But there is another form of colonization that runs even deeper, and we rarely name it:

The colonization of the mind.

Empires did not only seize territory; they seized something far more intimate. They took people’s relationship to themselves. They severed communities from their languages, ceremonies, cosmologies—from their understanding of who they were and why they were here.

They said:
Your ways are primitive.
Your gods are false.
Your medicines are superstition.
Your relationship to the land is naive.
Your songs, your stories, your visions—they are inferior to progress, to reason, to modernity.

Generation after generation, this message was internalized. The colonization moved from the external world into the interior one. People began to believe it themselves. They began to feel shame for the very things that had once made them whole.

This is the colonization that persists today, even among those of us whose ancestors did the colonizing. Modernity has colonized everyone’s mind. It has told all of us that the rational is superior to the intuitive. That productivity is the measure of a life. That the material world is the only real world. That the sacred is a fantasy for the weak.

We have all, in our own ways, been severed from our indigenous selves. In fact, even today, many of the indigenous ways of ceremony are illegal in many countries.

Why Spirituality Is Not a Luxury

Here is what I could not articulate to my activist friends all those years ago:

You cannot give what you do not have.

If we fight for justice from a place of fragmentation, reactivity, and unexamined wound, we will recreate the very systems we are trying to dismantle. We will burn out. We will turn on each other. We will win battles and lose ourselves.

I have watched this happen in movement after movement. The righteous rage that fuels the fight eventually consumes the fighters. The shadow goes unexamined. The trauma stays unhealed. And we end up reproducing the hierarchies, the cruelty, the dehumanization we swore we would end—just wearing different clothes.

Spirituality is not an escape from justice work. It is the foundation of it.

When we cultivate inner awareness, we begin to see clearly. We see our own conditioning. We see where our activism is rooted in genuine love and where it is fueled by unprocessed pain. We see the colonization that happened in our own minds—the ways we have been taught to distrust ourselves, to override our bodies, to silence our knowing.

And in that seeing, something revolutionary happens: we begin to remember who we actually are.

Not the self shaped by systems designed to make us compliant, productive, consuming, separate. But the self beneath all that. The self that is still connected to the earth, to each other, to something vast and sacred and unbroken.

The Stand That Comes from Remembering

When we wake up to our true nature, we do not become passive. We do not float away on a cloud of spiritual bypassing, indifferent to suffering.

We become more capable of taking a stand.

Because now our stand comes from wholeness, not from fragmentation. From love, not only from rage. From clarity, not only from reaction. We act because it is the natural expression of who we are—not because we are trying to prove our worth through sacrifice.

This is the revolution that colonization fears most: people who remember themselves. People who have reclaimed their minds, their bodies, their connection to the sacred. People who cannot be manipulated by shame or seduced by the promise of belonging to a system that was designed to use them.

The revolution on the outside begins with the revolution on the inside.

Not because the inner work is more important than the outer work, but because they are the same work. A mind that has been colonized will build colonizing structures, no matter how progressive its politics. A mind that has been liberated will build liberating structures, even in the smallest gestures of daily life.

An Invitation

To my fellow activists, I want to say: your inner life matters. Your healing matters. Your spiritual awakening—whatever form it takes—is not a betrayal of the cause. It is one of the deepest services you can offer it.

To my fellow spiritual seekers, I want to say: your awakening is not complete until it moves through you into the world. Enlightenment is not a private achievement. It is a gift that wants to be given away.

We need both. We have always needed both.

The mystics and the activists.
The inner revolution and the outer one.
The remembering of who we are and the building of a world that reflects that remembering.

This is the intersection where I have spent my life. It is not always comfortable. It is rarely understood. But I have come to believe it is the only place where lasting change is born.

The colonizers knew that to truly conquer a people, you had to conquer their minds.

May we know, with equal clarity, that to truly free a people, we must begin by freeing our minds.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

There I was, standing at the edge of Miami Beach with an ocean view that probably cost someone a million dollars, but I didn’t see anything because I was blinded by rage. I was absolutely seething.

Not the cute kind of annoyed. I mean the kind of rage that feels like meeting a bad ex at a high school reunion—familiar, unwelcome, and definitely not invited. This anger was ancient and feral, bubbling up from some primal place I thought I’d successfully gentrified decades ago.

When I’m overwhelmed, I become the worst version of myself: sharp-edged, unkind, and about as pleasant as a porcupine in a balloon factory. I usually guard against this with my arsenal of self-care—from hot baths to high protein, the occasional overpriced adaptogen—but this time I was running on fumes.

So I did what any evolved, spiritually-aware woman would do.

I sent a passive-aggressive text.

The text made everything worse, naturally. It was like drinking poison and hoping the other person would die. My own words stung me like salt on a fresh wound, and suddenly everyone was mad at me and I was furious at everyone else. But underneath all that drama was this uncomfortable awareness: passive aggression hurts me just as much—if not more—than it hurts anyone else.

Where Does Feminine Anger Go?

After the situation cooled (barely), I kept circling back to one question: What the hell are women supposed to do with anger in a culture that never gave us permission to have it in the first place?

Here’s where it goes:

She starves herself
She hates herself
She cuts herself
She punishes herself
She doubts herself
She weakens herself
She manifests autoimmune diseases
She becomes passive-aggressive (hi, it’s me)
She goes ice cold
She numbs out entirely

Sound familiar?

I’d bet my entire portfolio that not a single woman on this planet was taught how to be with anger in a healthy way. Anger is for men—strong, righteous, justified anger. Women get to be pleasing, pleasant, accommodating. We get to smile through our rage.

This Isn’t Just In Your Head

Here’s what makes this even more infuriating: the medical literature backs this up.

Chronic anger suppression in women is directly linked to elevated inflammation markers, autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and depression. Your body is literally attacking itself when you won’t let yourself attack what’s hurting you. There’s even a clinical theory that depression in women—which occurs at twice the rate of men—is often unexpressed anger turned inward. We’re not just being dramatic. We’re being physiological.

And the historical context? Even better. For over a century, women’s anger was pathologized as “hysteria”—a convenient medical diagnosis that allowed doctors to institutionalize, sedate, and silence women who dared to express rage or refuse compliance. We’re only a few generations past medically enforced emotional suppression.

Meanwhile, throughout all of history, men’s anger has been valorized as righteous, justified, principled. “Standing up for what’s right.” “Defending honor.” “Taking a stand.”

A woman expressing the exact same emotion? Hysterical. Emotional. Irrational. Crazy.

The double standard isn’t just cultural—it’s carved into our collective nervous systems, embedded in our medical history, and reinforced every single day.

The Spiritual Bypass Trap

And if you’re a “spiritual” woman? Then the conditioning goes extra special deep.

Enter: spiritual bypass. This is the mechanism where we slap a coat of spiritual gloss over our rage like we’re painting over mold. It creates this hollow, tinny quality to a woman’s energy field. You know the type—entirely pleasant, speaks in soft dulcet tones, smiles constantly, helpful and accommodating and yet... something about her energy makes you want to run screaming into the night?

That’s spiritual bypass in full effect. She’s performing perfection while her soul is screaming bloody murder underneath. And if she plays this game long enough, her body will eventually revolt—autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, mystery illnesses that no amount of green juice can fix. The body will not be silenced.

Anger is not meant to be suppressed. And it’s definitely not meant to have a spiritual layer of suppression shellacked over it like toxic positivity nail polish.

One of the comments that makes me want to throw furniture: “You should be able to overcome things quickly—after all, you’re a spiritual teacher.”

First of all, I’m not a spiritual teacher. Those times are over. We’re all each other’s teachers now, stumbling around in the dark together with varying degrees of grace. I’m human, just like you. And I have anger, just like you.

So the question remained: What the hell am I supposed to do with my anger?

The Kung Fu of Feminine Rage

I was at a party this past weekend, and I posed this question to one of my favorite badass humans—a singer-songwriter-actress-gorgeous-girlfriend who is all sass and style.

Her answer? “When I’m angry, I walk my dogs. Like, for days. I walk and walk until the intensity starts to calm down. And then I write a Ted talk.”

Brilliant. Here’s the full practice:

Step One: Move the body.

Walk, dance, swim, run, rage-clean your entire house. Get that anger unstuck from your nervous system before it calcifies into resentment or, God forbid, another passive-aggressive text. You cannot process what you cannot feel, and you cannot feel what’s locked in your body. Move first.

Step Two: Excavate the archaeology.

Once the intensity has dropped from a 10 to maybe a 6 or 7, it’s time to dig. Because here’s the thing: your current rage is almost never just about the current situation. It’s a trapdoor into something older, something unfinished.

Sit down with a journal and ask yourself: What does this remind me of?

When have I felt this exact flavor of anger before? What age was I? Who was there? What was happening?

This is where tools like Byron Katie’s “The Work” become invaluable. Take the thought that’s driving your anger—”They should respect my time,” “She shouldn’t have said that to me,” “He’s being completely unfair”—and interrogate it:

• Is it true?

• Can you absolutely know it’s true?

• How do you react when you believe that thought?

• Who would you be without that thought?

The goal isn’t to gaslight yourself out of your anger or convince yourself you’re wrong. The goal is to find the root system beneath the surface rage. Often our current anger is connected to an old wound—a childhood experience of being dismissed, invalidated, or powerless. A time when we should have been angry but weren’t allowed to be.

Excavate that. Name it. See it clearly. This step is about separating the 90% that belongs to your past from the 10% that belongs to the present moment.

Step Three: Write a TED Talk about it.

Now—and only now—are you ready for precision communication.

Once you’ve moved your body and excavated the archaeology, you can finally see what actually needs to be said to the person in front of you versus what needs to be healed in your own history.

Imagine you’re about to give a TED Talk to the person (or people) you’re angry at. Write it down. Make it concise, precise, devastatingly clear. Bullet points. No wasted energy. No dramatic flourishes or victim narratives.

Become a kung fu master of precision communication.

Even if you’re angry at the President of the United States, at your mother, at your business partner, at God herself—this is how you give your anger a voice that actually lands. Walk it out. Excavate the archaeology. Write the TED Talk. Share it in words, in a letter, in whatever form feels powerful.

This is how anger transforms from a poison into medicine. This is how we stop swallowing our rage and start wielding it with precision.

Your anger is not the problem. Your relationship to it is.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some excavating to do—and then some TED Talks to write.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Recently, I held a retreat for a group of men that opened my eyes in a way I had never experienced before. I could see each of them—from Israel, Venezuela, Peru, Morocco—not simply as individuals but as noble patriarchs, each entrusted with carrying their tribe forward as stewards of their culture.

I had never seen men in this way before, and I walked them through a meditation on the holy act of stewarding a tribe and the sacred communion of peace between tribes—a peacemaking meditation that is still reverberating in my heart.

This meditation stayed with me as I traveled through India these past weeks.

I am writing to you from the gardens of Suryagarh, in Jaisalmer, where I have been touched deeply and moved to share what this place has been quietly teaching me. Over these days, inviting in the new year with my family, I kept trying to understand what makes this place feel so profoundly different.

Delhi, as I wrote before, was a disheartening experience after having loved all of my prior travels through India. Delhi felt like a place that has lost something precious, and I wondered if all of India was losing something essential as modernity hurtles through with its voracious hunger to consume everything in its path.

Coming here renewed my faith in humanity—specifically, in witnessing that there is a man devoting his life to preserving what India has always been and what it can continue to be: an ark of culture worthy of preservation.

I had never thought much about Noah’s ark, but as I explored Suryagarh I could not help but feel the parallel between that ancient image and what has been built here.

The story of Noah’s ark is a symbolic map of inner transformation—a passage from corruption and chaos into purification, protection, and a new beginning with the Divine. It points to a clear discernment of what is out of alignment and the building of a safe inner ark of presence, a rebirth into a more conscious way of living. Noah was instructed to build an ark and bring his family and pairs of animals into it.

There is a parallel story told in the Vedas, the ancient spiritual scriptures of India. In that telling, Manu, the progenitor of humanity, saves a small fish who asks for protection. The fish grows vast and reveals itself as Matsya, the fish incarnation of Vishnu. Matsya warns Manu of a coming deluge that will destroy the world and instructs him to build a boat. Manu is told to gather pairs of animals—but also, and more importantly, to bring the Vedas themselves: all sacred knowledge must be carried into the ark.

Noah preserved biological diversity. Manu preserved the animals but also consciousness technologies—the Vedic transmissions of truth.

Both stories offer a teaching for our time: that we are human—entrusted with carrying forward what it means to belong to the tribe of humans, embodied, biological, and limited—and also beings capable of awakening to deeper spiritual knowing and the vastness of consciousness.

Human. Being.

For at least 4,000 years, across multiple civilizations, humans have understood that preservation in the face of destruction is a sacred duty. The story keeps returning because the crisis keeps returning, just in different forms. In ancient times, there were literal floods. Today, the flood is one of homogenization.

Subscribe now

There is also a third version, told in the Quran. Prophet Nuh is said to have spent 950 years warning his people while building his ark as they mocked him. When the waters came, even his own son refused to board, believing he could survive on the mountain alone. He drowned. And God said to Nuh: “He is not of your family; he is one whose work was other than righteous.” Faith and community, this story teaches, transcend blood.

Judaism says: Save the covenant with creation—all life is sacred.

Islam says: Save the community of conscious believers—faith transcends blood.

Hinduism says: Save the knowledge systems—wisdom is civilization’s DNA.

Perhaps we need all three.

What Suryagarh Preserves

This is why Suryagarh has been so inspiring to experience. This property is itself an ark, preserving sacred knowledge systems through everything: the traditional craftsmanship in every hand-carved stone, the ancient Rajasthani recipes that honor farm‑to‑table desert ingredients, the fully initiated yoga masters, the traditional healing methods in the spa.

Suryagarh is Manu’s ark standing before modernity’s immediate flood. It accepts that forms change—the hotel is not a museum frozen in time but a living practice. It trusts that by maintaining conscious relationship with tradition, something essential—call it cultural DNA, call it dharma, call it consciousness—remains intact even as the external world transforms.

The property sits in Rajasthan, in the Thar Desert, one of the driest regions on earth. The entire culture here evolved around water scarcity, extreme heat, and sandstorms. That is desert dharma: a body of lived wisdom around how to move, eat, store, celebrate, and rest in a harsh but holy landscape.

When that knowledge is replaced by air‑conditioned glass hotels with limitless water on tap, we lose precisely the wisdom the future will demand.

Cultural preservation is not passive nostalgia. It is the active maintenance of templates for how to live rightly in a specific place, with specific resources, in relationship with specific land. When you sleep in a room built with ancient proportions, eat food prepared according to traditional principles, and move through spaces designed for particular states of consciousness—you are downloading cultural DNA through your body.

This is how the ark works: through immersion, not observation. You are not merely a tourist; you are receiving a transmission of a way of being.

The Paradox of Jaisalmer

Here is what makes this story even more profound: Jaisalmer itself was created by cultural mixing. It is not some “pure” indigenous culture, but a synthesis culture, born from the Silk Road’s long, slow cosmopolitan exchange.

Founded in 1156 CE, Jaisalmer was a strategic node on ancient trade routes connecting the Indian Ocean to Central Asia, India to Persia to Arabia to the Mediterranean. Through this golden city flowed silk and spices, horses and precious stones—and with them Persian architectural influences, Central Asian building techniques, Islamic geometric patterns meeting Hindu temple ornamentation.

Jaisalmer’s golden havelis were not built by cultural isolationists. They were built by Jain merchants who grew wealthy on Silk Road trade—men who spoke multiple languages, appreciated Persian poetry, and commissioned architecture that blended influences from three continents.

What Suryagarh preserves is not some mythical “pure” Rajasthani culture that never existed. It preserves the capacity for cultures to meet, blend, and create something beautiful while maintaining their distinctiveness. The Silk Road showed that it is possible: exchange without erasure, cosmopolitanism without homogenization, trade without cultural annihilation. Cultures met slowly, as relative equals, and created fusion while remaining themselves.

What made the Silk Road different from modern globalization? On the Silk Road, cultures met as trading partners, not as colonizer and colonized. Each brought something valuable that the other genuinely desired.

Ideas flowed in multiple directions: Persia influenced India; India influenced Persia. And crucially, the exchange happened at human speed. Caravans took months to cross the desert, which allowed time for discernment, digestion, and integration.

Modernity’s flood does not arrive by camel caravan. It arrives through fiber‑optic cable at the speed of light. Instagram can export a Los Angeles café aesthetic to every corner of the earth in seconds. Western—mainly American—culture becomes the default setting, and other cultures are recoded as “exotic.”

The flood is not evil. Connection is holy. But the speed and asymmetry can drown local culture before it has time to respond creatively. Change now moves faster than cultures can metabolize. One generation is enough to sever living connection to ancestral ways. There is no time for synthesis, only for submission or extinction.

You can have Starbucks in Jaisalmer, but you will not find chai wallahs on every corner in American towns. Local architecture is replaced by anonymous glass boxes. Regional cuisines are pushed to the margins by fast‑food chains. Traditional crafts disappear because mass production is “cheaper.” Languages—carriers of entire worlds—vanish; UNESCO estimates that roughly one language dies every two weeks, and around 40% of the world’s languages are currently at risk.

The hotel owner at Suryagarh is not curating a museum. He is tending a living ecosystem—the difference between taxidermy and a thriving forest. This is his gift to the world: a template, a proof of concept. Evidence that it is still possible to honor tradition while serving modernity, to preserve culture while remaining economically viable, to maintain distinctiveness while welcoming outsiders.

Like Noah, he has spent years building while others rushed past. Like Manu, he seems to understand that what must be saved is not just physical forms but the knowledge and consciousness encoded within them. Like Nuh, he chooses faith over blood—creating family not merely through lineage but through shared commitment to preservation and experiences that will be remembered for a lifetime.

Every generation faces a flood. Ours looks like endless scroll, mass migration, and disappearing ways of being. Every generation must ask: What are we putting in our ark?

When culture is not preserved, people still survive, but they do so cut off from context and origin. The result is a quiet, chronic grief that is easy to misdiagnose as anxiety or meaninglessness.

After forty days (which, not coincidentally, is also the time many say it takes to break a habit), Noah’s ark found land and released the animals to repopulate the earth. The hope woven into these ancient stories is that arks are not endpoints but seed banks. When the flood of homogenization recedes—or when enough people wake up to what has been lost—places like Suryagarh can help regenerate regional consciousness and diversity by planting the seeds of what was kept sacred.

Perhaps Suryagarh is preserving all three of the dimensions the flood stories ask us to protect: the sacred relationship with this specific ecosystem (creation), the community committed to preservation (faith), and the knowledge embedded in every carved stone and traditional recipe (dharma).

The Silk Road suggests it is possible. Jaisalmer proves it has already happened. Whether it can happen again depends on how many arks survive the flood—and how many of us choose to board them not as tourists seeking entertainment, but as students willing to receive transmission.

The man who built Suryagarh is offering more than a place to stay. He is offering a way of seeing, a way of being, a remembrance of what humans can create when we move slowly enough to honor place, when we meet as equals rather than conquerors, when we understand that preservation is not resistance to change but protection of our capacity to change consciously.

This is the work of the noble patriarch I saw in those men at the retreat: stewardship of what must not be lost. This is the communion of peace between tribes: preservation not of purity, but of possibility.

The flood is here. The question is not whether we will lose much—we will. The real questions are: What are we choosing to save? And are we brave enough to board the arks others have built, even when the world calls them backward, inefficient, impractical?

Because after the flood, these seeds become everything.

Human. Being.

Both. Always both.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

When I was younger, I lived in Argentina. Every Friday, as I walked through Buenos Aires, I passed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. White scarves circled their heads like halos of grief, photographs of their disappeared children hanging from their necks on cardboard squares. They stood there, week after week, mourning, protesting, searching for their relatives who had been swept off the streets during the guerra sucia—the dirty war.

I was usually carrying a massage table when I saw them. An impossibly heavy one I’d commissioned from a local ironworker because such things didn’t yet exist in Argentina. It weighed nearly as much as I did, and I’d haul it onto leaded-gas buses like some kind of wellness Sherpa, determined to bring California bodywork techniques to wealthy Porteños who had never heard of alternative healing before.

Looking back, I must have been quite a sight: a twenty-something American woman wrestling a table the size of a small car through one of the world’s most sophisticated cities.

Thirty thousand souls are still missing from those years. People who spoke their truth and vanished without trial, without process, without goodbye. I didn’t understand loss yet. I was too young, too unacquainted with real grief. I just walked past the mothers on my way to somewhere else, carrying my absurdly heavy table, thinking I was going to change the world one healing at a time.

I didn’t understand the scars on my boyfriend’s back either, though I traced them with my fingers as we lay together on our futon bed. Thin raised lines ran from his neck to his sacrum, souvenirs from a teenage protest when military police had taught him the price of speaking up.

There’s a vast distance between seventh-grade bullying and eleventh-grade beatings from military police. He carried Big T Trauma. I carried anxiety about whether my Spanish was good enough to order lunch.

Marcelo was more than a boyfriend. He was my first real teacher. We met when I was nineteen, during that year when everything happens to you all at once and you think you’re so cosmopolitan and wise when really you’re just barely formed. He introduced me to ayahuasca, spirituality, shadow work, bodywork, empanadas, and la ciudad de la furia. He completely altered the trajectory of my life.

Those first years abroad were not easy. I felt lifetimes away from everyone I knew, fumbling through a language learned not from textbooks but from street corners. Once I accidentally asked a market vendor for “the lettuce woman” when I meant to order “the best lettuce.” The words are so close in Spanish—la mujer lechuga, la mejor lechuga—and my gringa tongue couldn’t find the difference.

I knew Marcelo wasn’t my forever person, but I also knew I couldn’t leave yet. When a friend visited and asked why I would stay in that hyper-polluted, politically unstable city with a man more than a decade older, I told her those years felt like grit I needed to endure to become whoever I was supposed to become. I needed honing.

The truth is, I was being honed. After nearly a decade, the business we’d built by improvisation and sheer audacity had become real. And perhaps I had become real too, honed by the sharp edges of that intense city.

Subscribe now

But knowing it was time to leave proved harder than staying. I’ve written elsewhere about impossible decisions, those moments when the choice is so difficult you simply can’t make it, and the discomfort stretches you for months beyond your normal frame of self. The decision to leave Marcelo, our business, the country itself, stretched me for months—all the way to Patagonia and back, into the arms of another man and back, to India and back, until finally I knew.

Sometimes the only way to make an impossible decision is to exhaust every alternative first.

Saying goodbye was hard because my adult identity had been forged in Argentina. I was a teacher there, part of a vibrant community, fluent in a language I’d learned by making a thousand embarrassing mistakes. I had no idea who I’d be on the other side.

America astonished me when I returned. I stood in Target, bewildered by seventeen varieties of shampoo, by the sheer breathing room of democracy and capitalism, by how easy everything was. I felt mostly un-American, like I’d been gone long enough to become a stranger in my own country.

I left Argentina to breathe and to become. Marcelo stayed to die.

I didn’t know he was already harboring lung cancer when I said goodbye. A year later, he had a terminal diagnosis and I had a new partner. When I learned the news, I wanted to fly back to see him immediately. But my new boyfriend forbade it. “The past is over,” he said, and I didn’t want to risk losing him by returning to a man I’d once loved.

The beautiful irony, of course, is that both men are long gone now. But the love I felt for Marcelo remains like the tattoo it always was—a tattoo of truth.

When Marcelo died, finally succumbing to the cancer that demanded his urgent exit, his last words were: “I did not know I had to die to finish healing.”

Those words have haunted me ever since. A teaching that changed everything. I have sat with them for years, turned them over like a stone that catches light differently depending on how you hold it.

I write this from India, a place I loved when I was young, visiting often during those same years I lived in Argentina. I loved this place for the profound transmission of truth I received here while meditating at the sacred hill of Arunachala. That still and magnificent mountain presence taught me that awakening is our human birthright and that death is just a chapter in the evolution of our souls.

This current trip to India is different. I’m getting to experience the other side of the culture: politics, bureaucrats, business. I’m sitting in a fancy perfumed hotel in a cold, smog-filled city—quite a delta from the simple ashram life I knew before.

I can’t tell if I’m simply in a different dimension of India, or if the country itself has changed, hurtling toward modernity. Maybe both. Maybe neither. What I do know for certain is that the invitation remains the same, whether I’m in that peaceful ashram or this congested metropolis, whether I’m twenty or fifty, whether I’m hauling a massage table through Buenos Aires or sitting in a hotel room in Delhi.

The invitation of your lifetime. The invitation of mine.

To wake up.

Marcelo’s teaching is more haunting and important than ever. I leave it with you now, nothing added and nothing taken away, just as his words should be. They were passed to me that way, the final gift from the beloved soul who brought me to Argentina, to the mothers in their white scarves, to touch grief- and then released me.

As we enter the New Year and remember what we came here to become, may Marcelo’s reminder be part of all our 2026 prayers: We came here to wake up. And sometimes, we don’t fully become what we were always meant to be until we’re willing to let everything else die.

Even if it takes us a lifetime—and several continents to figure that out.

I am leaving Delhi now, on my way to Jaisalmer, to experience a new facet of this multi dimensional country.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

I’m going to tell you a story that will wreck you in the best possible way.

Fair warning: There are no productivity hacks here. No manifestation techniques. No morning routines that will change your life. Just one story that might change how you see your own impossible choices.

A woman told me this in ceremony, and I’ve carried it ever since.

She came from a noble Italian family—the kind with a historic palace and bloodlines spanning centuries. We were discussing how trauma passes through family lines, creating actual modifications in DNA. But then she reminded me: blessings travel through generations too. Codes of generosity and illumination pass down just as surely as trauma.

Her family’s home sat at the center of German occupation in northern Italy, just outside Milan.

The stakes were biblical. Anyone caught helping Jews escape was executed in the public square. A family relative—a doctor—was killed exactly this way for providing medical care to the wrong person.

So here’s the moral Rubik’s cube her ancestor faced: his children or his conscience? Turn a blind eye to atrocity and teach them that survival trumps soul, or risk everything—including their lives—to do what was right.

Most of us will never face a choice this extreme. (Though we tell ourselves we’re making “impossible” decisions when we’re really just choosing between two good job offers or whether to text someone back.)

But here’s what I know: the divine loves an impossible problem. When you’re stretched in every direction, when there is no comfortable answer—that’s not a sign you’ve failed. That’s spiritual growth trying to happen.

The patriarch found his answer in the stables, right next to where the Nazi tanks sat gleaming in the sun.

Subscribe now

He chose to hide Jewish families in his home at the center of the city. But feeding them was nearly impossible. The Nazis tracked every supply coming in and out. A family of five suddenly acquiring food for fifty? Instant execution.

His young children asked why. Why must we lie to our friends and keep this secret? Why are you risking our lives to save strangers?

His answer was simple: “If you do nothing in the face of evil, you become part of it.”

So he made a trade that would make any accountant weep: He began slaughtering his prized racehorses, one by one, to feed the souls passing through his home toward hopeful freedom.

These weren’t ponies from a petting zoo. These were exquisitely bred horses worth a fortune—his family’s wealth and legacy walking on four legs. And he turned them into food for strangers the Nazis were hunting.

The Nazis never noticed racehorses disappearing. Why would they?

A horse for Source. That was the exchange rate.

He had no idea what ripple effects his actions would create, how many souls he released from suffering, how many lives continued because of horses with elegant Italian names I’ll never learn to pronounce.

He just did what he knew was right.

Here’s what makes this story sing: It’s not about who’s the Jew or who’s the Catholic. It’s about one person who chose to ignite light, despite the cost.

The Kabbalists call this Tikkun Olam—”repairing the world.” They teach that divine light scatters throughout creation in broken shards, and our job is to find and elevate these sparks through right action, through conscious living. Each choice aligned with compassion liberates a spark, brightening the collective field.

Buddhism describes bodhicitta—the awakened heart-mind that vows to free all beings. The luminous nature of mind, where awareness itself is clear light.

The Qur’an speaks of God as An-Nur, “the Light of the heavens and the earth,” describing guidance as moving “from darkness into light.” A believer carries this light in the heart, illuminating character and action.

Hindu teachings describe Atman, pure consciousness, as “the light that illumines our minds and animates our existence”—the inner radiance we realize through practice and let flow into thought, speech, and action.

Jesus called himself “the light of the world” and then told his followers, “You are the light of the world… let your light shine before men.”

Every tradition points to the same truth: We are here to ignite light in whatever way we can.

So here’s my question for you: What are your horses?

What valuable thing are you being asked to trade—not for survival, not for comfort, but for Source? For light? For what you know in your bones is right?

I’m not talking about grand gestures. Most of us won’t face Nazis at our door. But we all face moments where the right action costs us something we value. Where being comfortable means being complicit. Where the divine whispers, “Here’s your impossible problem—grow.”

The patriarch risked everything for strangers. His life, his wife’s life, his three children’s lives. He didn’t know if his actions would work. He had no guarantee. He just had horses, hungry people, and a choice to be part of the light.

That’s enough.

That’s always been enough.

May we all have the courage to sacrifice our horses when our moment comes.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

I met NBA Hall of Famer Alonzo Mourning last week, and he said something that stopped me in my tracks: “I want to create a contagion of blessing with my life.”

A contagion of blessing.
What would it mean to live so fully that your every action ripples outward, touching others with light?

This is the true promise of the season. Whether we celebrate Diwali, Hanukkah, or Christmas, we’re all honoring the same ancient truth: light returns to illuminate the darkness. Historians believe early Christians chose the winter solstice to celebrate Christ’s birth precisely because it was already sacred—the darkest night before dawn breaks again. This story echoes through time, from Egyptian myths to every culture that has ever waited through winter for the return of the sun.

Christ consciousness is not religious—it’s the awakening available to us all. It means living from unconditional love, seeing the divine in every being, choosing forgiveness over judgment, and recognizing our fundamental unity.

It’s service over ego, compassion over fear, and the courage to be a light-bearer in dark times.

It doesn’t take money—only intention. When my children were younger, I kept poster boards and markers in our car. Before pulling out of any parking lot, we’d choose a random car and write notes to the stranger parked there: “You are so loved” or “Keep shining, beautiful.” We’d tuck them under windshield wipers, tiny seeds of light planted in unknown hearts. On Christmas Eve, we’d venture downtown or into parks offering free hugs to anyone who needed one—a tradition I cherished until my sons reached puberty and, mortified, made me stop.

This universal story begins again with you.
How will you spark a contagion of blessing this month?

I want to celebrate you.

I will be dropping a special meditation this month for all readers, to ignite the light within. If you want to work with me one-on-one, write to me about how you’re sparking light this month. I’ll choose several people to receive a customized healing gift—something created specifically for your journey, your awakening, your next step into greater consciousness as you begin the new year.

Let’s create this contagion of blessing together.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Years ago, on the dirt floor of a healing maloka deep in Colombia, I dissolved.

The ayahuasca carried me through an ego death that felt less like an ending and more like transformation—my sense of self shattering into a million particles of light. As my consciousness merged into that luminescence, I witnessed what I can only describe as the future of money itself.

A tribe of elders appeared in my vision, gathered in prayer over the very frequency of modern currency. I understood, with the crystalline clarity that comes only in such states, why they were interceding: humanity had inverted the sacred order; we’d turned the proxy into the deity. Most had forgotten that money is time-energy frozen until it is put to use. Many had ascribed value to money itself, rather than what it could set in motion once released.

Then I heard it—a voice as clear as if someone had spoken directly into my ear: “God blesses the coders.”

The coders. Not the bankers, not the politicians, not the priests—but the coders. Those who are literally building the systems, protocols, and new rails that will allow programmable money itself to evolve, to awaken, to flow toward abundance rather than scarcity.

And not necessarily because the code itself is sacred, but because code currently mediates value, attention, and increasingly, agency itself.

There’s an elegance to the sequence. Crypto laid the rails for global value exchange—blockchains, stablecoins, and Layer 2 networks forming the groundwork for a programmable economy. Then came the rise of AI, a revolution capable of freeing humanity from repetitive labor and redefining the meaning of work itself.

Coders are writing both stories at once: building transparent, rule-based systems of programmable money we can audit, automate, and align with shared values; and training AI to reallocate time and dignity, opening space for care, creativity, and discovery. Then, binding these together are emerging agentic identity and payment protocols that let both people and agents transact, coordinate, and build trust across digital space.

Last week, I found myself in Riyadh, speaking on a panel at FII—a conference that pulses with a particular species of power. I spent days wandering the desert, intoxicated by a culture both ancient and urgently modern, navigating a conference that was, truthfully, intimidating.

The speaker lounge alone contained more concentrated influence than most cities: founders, CEOs, heads of state. Everyone was either selling, buying, or innovating. You were making transactions, or you were what everyone wanted to transact.

The ritual was always the same: handshake, immediate exchange of credentials, instant calibration of hierarchy. When I explained that I worked with a family office consulting business, focusing on the intersection of capital and consciousness, I could feel myself being placed somewhere near the bottom of the power totem pole.

But that phrase—”capital and consciousness”—worked like a specific lure cast into a sea of whales.

Most ignored it. But a few would bite, the energy would shift from extract to explore, their eyes brightening with curiosity, recognition, and suddenly we would bypass the transactional entirely and enter something deeper. I could share why I was truly there: to invite fellow travelers into a conversation about awakening, about doing our work in the world from a more conscious vantage point.

The ones who bit hardest on consciousness? The coders. Almost exclusively, the ones who had shipped code at scale and built multi-billion dollar companies.

We need our coders to wake up.

ChatGPT arrived 1,000 days ago. Some are predicting superintelligent AGI in another 1,000 days—machines surpassing human intelligence across every domain. I don’t fear this future. I see it illuminated with possibility: a world where disputes dissolve because all laws, precedents, and judicial wisdom consolidate into a singular, unbiased intelligence. An uber-intelligence we could trust as authority—capable of ending wars by revealing the truth beneath our conflicts.

But the critical question is this: how are these systems learning, and what is feeding the models? Right now, they inherit the patterns in their training data and rewards—patterns saturated with human bias and historical prejudice.

The architecture of tomorrow’s intelligence is being written today, and if we want that intelligence to be wise rather than merely powerful, we need awakened humans building it.

The awakening of a single human consciousness is of cosmic significance. When a coder awakens—when they pierce the veil of separation and recognize their unity with all things—they bring that recognition into their code. They understand how to build systems that serve the whole rather than consolidate power. They can architect abundance rather than replicate scarcity.

This is the deeper meaning of that voice in the maloka, speaking through visions of elder prayers and future currencies: God blesses the coders because they are writing the operating system of our collective future. And if they write it while awake—truly awake—everything changes.
Everything.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Co-authored with Benjamin Wald — visionary engineer, coder, and healer.

The fluid merging of tradition and tech in Riyadh.

Once, I found myself at dinner with the founder of OnlyFans. He wasn’t the most flamboyant guest at the table, but the stories he shared left a lasting impression. As he recounted building the platform and explained his motivation to empower women at its core, I noticed my own preconceptions shifting.

Who was I to judge?

So, it didn’t surprise me when a friend shared that some women are using OnlyFans not as an explicit platform, but as a space to receive spiritual tributes from men—devotees who see them as living embodiments of the divine feminine. In these cases, OnlyFans becomes less a marketplace for adult content and more a modern sanctuary for goddess worship.

This isn’t new. Humanity’s longing for the divine feminine has deep roots, evidenced in countless temples and shrines across the world. Traditionally, devotees offered coins, flowers, or prayers to priestesses or statues, each tribute a form of reverence. In the ancient Hindu tradition, the divine feminine is honored by a thousand Sanskrit names—so manifold is her importance.

I was reminded of another encounter with the sacred feminine outside formal spiritual settings: a crowded, steamy drag bar in Cuba, known for its glamorous queens and fervent audience.

What struck me most wasn’t just the performers’ beauty, but the genuine reverence in the way locals gave them money. Each offering was made with respect, sometimes even on bended knee. In contrast, in much of Western culture, tipping in strip clubs often feels more like an act of domination or objectification—a way to diminish rather than uplift.

The difference was palpable.

What does it mean when a culture kneels before the feminine on stage, offering tribute out of awe and gratitude? And what does it say about us when we cannot do the same?

So when I learned that women are claiming empowerment on OnlyFans, I understood. My friend told me about a woman who channels Kali herself—the goddess of destruction and creation—receiving tributes from male devotees. Why not? I have been blessed by incomparable female spiritual teachers, and today I serve as a guide to women who are apprenticing on their own paths. Stories like this inspire me to reconsider spiritual lineage and its future—long after my time.

“Lineage” comes from “line”—a link, a flow. When I was young, I searched for a lineage and, thankfully, found one; it sustains me to this day. But as a teacher with students of my own, I’ve had to reevaluate what lineage means. It’s changing.

Historically, lineages relied on the unidirectional transmission of wisdom, from teacher to student. Today, I think true lineage means a teacher recognizing each student’s unique gifts and holding space for those gifts to grow—offering shelter, not control. This is the “grandmother frequency”: not about hierarchy, but about nurturing new lineages through protection and encouragement. The power no longer resides in the teacher alone, but in the students who will carry wisdom into the future. The teacher’s role is to safeguard their gifts until they are ready to become guides themselves.

This is a profound shift. When I hear about women gathering devotees on OnlyFans, I celebrate it. “Fans” become “devotees.” May more women find power in their essence, attracting tributes purely for revealing who they are.

Last week, I worked with a cherished student—a gifted woman who’s studied with me for a year—who experienced a real breakthrough. She thanked me afterwards, calling me her spiritual mother. In her native language, there are two words for “thank you.” She spoke both to me: “Spasibo” (meaning “God save you”) and “Blago Daryu” (“I give blessings”). Hearing both, I felt the gratitude as a genuine tribute—a recognition not of my authority or knowledge, but of my role as “godmother” of her emerging gifts.

May spiritual power always belong to those who protect and nurture the gifts of others until they’re ready to soar.

So today, I want to extend thanks to the founder of OnlyFans. You were a wonderful dinner companion, but more importantly, you showed me how devotion can look different in our time—and how vital it is to broaden my perspective.

The day is coming when spiritual power will be democratized and distributed, not hoarded. The teachers of the future aren’t gatekeepers, but guardians—protectors of the next generation’s spiritual gifts, and midwives to their becoming.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Many moons ago, when I was a maiden not yet familiar with the steep ways of the adult, I found myself lost in wild territory—both literally and metaphorically.

I was mistress to the gods of wild range and resilience, perpetually stretching myself from barefoot river walks to stilettos in gritty bars, from punk rock, to fern tendrils in search of unbreakable toughness. I had stretched myself all the way from the ciudad de la furia, Buenos Aires, where I was living then, to the end of the earth as we know it: Patagonia, where I had escaped.

I escaped for a season. My boyfriend and I were taking a trial separation after six years together. He went to Australia, leaving me to head south until I reached a place so remote you could walk for days and not see a single other person.

He’d been my beloved since college, and the idea of us not being forever was absolutely blowing my mind even as we took space. The separation was his idea. He’d asked me to marry him, and my response—a full-body vomit in front of a group of friends—wasn’t what either of us had hoped for. I thought I was ready to marry because the world seemed ready for me to marry. But the wild child of my heart wasn’t ready to surrender. Not yet. My body did not lie.

So I ran away to the Torres del Paine. It was summer and the sun never set, just hovered in the sky, performing a midnight dance of fiery reds. In that land of eternal sun, I fell in love. Not just once, but twice. Simultaneously.

All while still loving and longing for my boyfriend, even as I sensed it was actually over.

One was a German poet, an acrobat and muse. He was wiry, with long scraggly blond hair and a beautiful amber pendant. We had nothing in common except our dedication to wilderness, our love of hot saunas followed by cold glacier plunges, and overtone chanting.

The other was a different species of wild. Born in the Chilean mountains, he was raised by a father who taught him to climb as soon as he could walk. Grizzly. Strong. Eyes like struck flint. His heart was a mountain—steady, amused by us city folk who didn’t understand nature or maintain any relationship with her. He laughed when I tried to follow him into the Sierras, laughed at my tiny, unsure feet, laughed at my terror on the climbing rope. But he knew exactly how to wrap all my tininess into his bear arms and make me feel huge, secure, at home.

These men captured my heart simultaneously, and I had no idea what to do about it. For months, I was lost in confusion. I’d hike for ten hours through the Torres del Paine, and instead of tracking the magical transition from temperate forest to shrubs to moss to rock to glacier ice, my mind bounced frantically between them both.

Who should I be with?

I knew I’d see my actual boyfriend at summer’s end, so I had two months to figure out what my heart truly wanted. Two incredibly uncomfortable months. Messy. Human. No matter how many pros-and-cons lists I made, no matter how hard I prayed to be shown an answer, I remained utterly confused.

When summer ended, I left both of those beautiful wild boys. I think they still live there today.

I returned to my boyfriend only to break up with him, too. Turns out none of them were mine. My boyfriend actually passed away not long after that, in what will be another story to tell here one day. What was mine lay years ahead on the Camino, and in many ways is still revealing itself. We are surface walkers. Here to walk—maybe never truly meant to arrive.

I heard the poet David Whyte suggest recently that perhaps there’s magic in not knowing. In those moments when choice feels impossible.

Who should I be with?
What should my career be?
Where should I live?

What if the magic lies in letting ourselves be profoundly uncomfortable in the unknown? What if the very appearance of multiple paths exists only to stretch us in ways we haven’t been stretched before? What if the medicine is in the discomfort itself, in growing and stretching and not knowing, until finally our identity stretches too?

When we find ourselves at those crossroads, can we recognize ourselves as stretched, as growing, as grander beings for having faced uncertainty with bravery and faith?

Looking back at that summer when I was just a young surface walker with no idea how many paths I’d walk, how they’d keep surprising me, how my life would look nothing like I’d imagined (and what a gift that would be)—I see no certainty, nothing that could have been predicted. Only the stretch.

I marvel at its range, so wide, so impossibly expansive. I marvel at its resilience. I feel her, and all the multitude of paths she walked, like a great strength within me.

Maybe next time I’m confused about what to do, I’ll get down on my knees and say a prayer of gratitude—that I’m still worthy of being stretched, young enough to keep growing, resilient enough to be pulled like a rubber band and snapped into something new.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

PS: If you want to time travel with me—back to the bars and bus stops of Patagonia, to the girl who didn’t yet know who she’d become—this was the soundtrack of that season.

Soda Stereo. En la Ciudad de la Furia.

Still makes my heart stretch a little wider.

Heartbreak sucks. I’ve had heartbreaks so bad my arms ached because my heart was in so much pain. Heartbreaks so consuming I couldn’t sleep for days, couldn’t take a deep breath. I once had a heartbreak so complete I lost faith in the entire universe and decided the god of my understanding was cruel and unworthy of my trust.

That heartbreak changed my life.

Just when I thought the pain would never end, I fell into restless sleep one night and found myself dreaming. I was on Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, watching a figure approach from the distance, dressed head to toe in black silk. A raven. It was Gabrielle Roth—the raven mother herself, my teacher. Her son was the man who had broken my heart.

Gabrielle taught us to dance our prayers, a meditation practice for a moving generation called “the five rhythms.” Of course it would be her walking toward me.

As she drew closer, I saw she carried something in her arms. A wedding dress. The dress of every marriage fantasy I’d ever harbored deep within me. When she stood directly before me, she handed it to me and said, “Sylvia, dance the marriage to yourself.”

I danced the medicine my heartbreak needed. Like a sundance or a raindance, but for self-love. I married myself in that dream, in a swirl of white. What I learned I didn’t yet have words for, but it was the first step in my slow recovery from love addiction.

Love addiction is everywhere in our culture—the plot of every rom-com ever made. We don’t talk about it. If anything, we feed it deeper into each other.

It has taken me decades to understand sobriety in the context of love. Like all sobriety, the key is recognizing we’ve made something—anything—a higher power than the divine itself. Reclaiming that is a profound act of self-love, and in that self-love lives the most potent seed of awakening I’ve ever known.

I have come to honor heartbreak. It’s one of the best portals to the divine. It stops us, breaks us, humbles us, extends us into a territory of grief as vast, cold, and empty as a Montana field in late fall. And it’s the vastness of that grief that finally pushes us out of our sealed-up log cabin and into the dark night. We feel the immense grief and have nowhere else to bring it, so we bring it to the field itself. We breathe the crisp, dry, cold air into our lungs and feel gratitude for that breath. Then we finally, finally turn our heads up to the Montana night sky and are shattered by a million infinite stars.

That is how the divine works with us. It finds the places we’re most afraid to break open and does the job for us. Heartbreak hurts because it’s supposed to. An incurable hurt. You can either repress it, flatten yourself, numb out—or you can let it rip. If you let the pain rip you all the way open, that’s exactly where the alchemy begins.

Sobriety in love is on my mind this week because I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, All the Way to the River. In the book, she exposes her own journey of sobriety from love addiction. For someone who became famous for one of the great love stories of all time, her willingness to expose herself so honestly is remarkable. She’s apparently being skewered by literary critics, which reminds me of when someone once criticized a friend of mine—a life coach—for lacking formal credentials. My response was, “That guy without fancy diplomas is out there saving lives. What are you doing to save lives?” Her book will save lives.

I applaud Gilbert for throwing a lifeline.

And for you, dear reader, if you’re suffering heartbreak: congratulations.

You are one step closer to knowing the infinite love that you are—love that can never be broken, never be taken, and is always enough.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

“If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative when you are old, you have no brain.”

This familiar adage suggests a linear progression from idealistic youth to pragmatic age, yet my own journey has traced a more complex arc—one that moves beyond the binary toward something deeper.

In my youth, I embodied the fervor of absolute conviction. My identity crystallized around radical ideology, and my self-worth forged in the fires of protest and resistance. I marched on Washington, orchestrated disruptive demonstrations, transformed libraries into stages for performance art, and penned lengthy manifestos steeped in what I believed were the only unassailable truths.

I was fearless in my certainty. At nineteen, I stormed into a strip club with warrior-like audacity, mounting their stage to confront what I saw as patriarchal oppression—until security ejected me back into the night. I percussion-protested with pots and pans, my body a human barricade across forest roads to halt the march of chainsaws.

My material existence reflected my philosophical stance: my entire wardrobe consisted of three outfits, because surely that was all any conscious human required. One pair of five-dollar cloth Mary Janes served as my sole footwear, though I preferred the direct communion of bare feet with earth. My bicycle was both transportation and testament, while cars, television, and capitalism formed what I considered an unholy trinity of societal decay.

Then came the rupture that would reshape everything. During a summer internship with an herbalist in Boulder, I encountered my spiritual teacher.

In her presence, my carefully constructed edifice of righteousness crumbled. My chest ached as if the scaffolding around my heart had been yanked loose. I felt both stripped bare and weightless—like a soldier suddenly realizing there was never a war.

The stark divisions of right and wrong, good and evil, left and right, suddenly revealed themselves as constructs of a mind trapped in polarity. I glimpsed something beyond the battlefield of opposing forces—a realm where wisdom emerges not from choosing sides, but from transcending the very notion of sides.

But awakenings rarely translate neatly into community. My own tribe would soon remind me of the cost of divergence.

Returning to campus, I attempted to share this revelation with my activist community, only to face their profound disappointment. They staged an intervention in the college parking lot, encircling me as evidence of my betrayal mounted—I had borrowed my boyfriend’s car instead of cycling to class. This vehicular transgression, they declared, proved I had abandoned the sacred values that bound our tribe together.

I found myself suspended between worlds, questioning how to live authentically.

In the years that followed, while maintaining my environmental convictions and rejecting excessive materialism, I became increasingly oriented toward spiritual awakening rather than external activism. Most of my energy flowed inward, leaving little for the outward battle.

Today, I wrestle anew with this balance. My perspectives have evolved through the alchemy of experience and maturation. I am less identified with polarities, understanding them now as cosmic forces inherent in creation’s dance—the eternal push and pull that drives evolution itself. Yet I witness our democracy convulsing in polarity’s grip, a nation exhausted by the relentless warfare of facts, information, and debate.

What we desperately need is wisdom, and wisdom emerges only from awareness.

This raises profound questions about consciousness and civic life:

What role does awareness play in a functioning democracy? How might each of us contribute to this greater awakening?

I invite you to contemplate these questions alongside me.

Awakening for the people, by the people.

This is my prayer.
This is my hope.
This is my invitation to you, my friends.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

P.S.

If you haven’t experienced the latest season of South Park, I offer it as unexpected medicine. Whether or not you align with their perspectives, they hold up an unflinching mirror to our collective vanity, ridiculousness, and myopia.

Their irreverent laughter serves as balm for my soul in these fractured times, and I’m grateful to Paramount for ensuring such voices survive when so many others face silencing.

I fasted for five days before writing this newsletter.

It began as a tribute to my dear friend following her passing, as a small group of us made a pilgrimage to the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. We were bringing her ashes to the Palomino River.

As I was fasting, I received disturbing news about the shaman I used to study plant medicine healing with—who, by happenstance, is also from Colombia. I added this news to my "prayer pile”.

The convergence of death medicine with this utterly disillusioning revelation, both connected to the native traditions of Colombia, was intense to process. The fasting, I hoped, would help me clarify and deepen whatever teaching was embedded in this moment.

I fasted until I returned to Miami, and I was still without clarity.

Back home in Miami, I went on a date night with my husband (to Mad Radio, our favorite dive bar) and broke my fast with a burger, still wondering—what was I supposed to learn? What was being revealed? That night, as we listened to the DJ spinning vinyl records, the answer came to me.

The answer was Taylor Swift.

The Death That Clarified Everything

My friend was young, a beautiful soul who embodied the very core frequency of divine feminine power. She was a passionate steward of the earth, and as she gracefully moved through the cancer that ultimately took her, I often wondered why she had to suffer.

It seemed to me that her very body, her blood itself, was a mirror showing us the impact of how we contaminate the earth. She was such a pure soul—it felt like we had failed her. Her body was the canary in the coal mine, showing us that our way of living on this planet, trashing it with plastic and forever chemicals and endless consumption, was something an angel like her simply couldn't survive.

Much like a river cannot expel the chemicals we dump into her—our toxins work their way into her sand, her fish, her weeds. We poison entire systems with our greed and ignorance.

My friend's body was the river.

It was a perfect ritual to release her ashes into the rivers of her homeland, guided by tribes who are keepers of deeply sacred ways of honoring the divine feminine and the earth.

The Death of Sacred Lineage

During that pilgrimage, another death was unfolding around me.

Over ten years ago, I began studying with a tribe from Colombia under the tutelage of a young but brilliant healer. I felt a call to apprentice with him and took this apprenticeship seriously. Early in my studies, one of his male acolytes approached me inappropriately. I reported the incident—I felt it was important to have clear boundaries between students and healers.

It is deeply confusing—and possibly harmful—to work with these powerful and sacred technologies of consciousness born in the Amazon while trying to navigate blurred sexual boundaries.

My warning was unheeded. Yet, I carried on in my studies, hoping it was an isolated incident.

Years later, it emerged that it was not an isolated incident. In fact, the same man had gone on to harass many other women in this lineage. That, coupled with a serious boundary violation from a grandfather (an elder healer with significant spiritual authority) involving several female students—and an unclear response to prevent recurrence—is why I ultimately left and found apprenticeship elsewhere.

The tragedy deepened recently. The main teacher—by all accounts an extraordinary healer—admitted to an affair with a student twenty years his junior, after she exposed him publicly. As I processed my friend's transition during our pilgrimage, I witnessed the figurative death of an entire family of healers, now left reeling, trying to understand how to carry on.

As I fasted and prayed in the Sierra Nevada, this question worked its way through my heart: What is the divine feminine to do?

The Shaman in Sequins

I have never been a Taylor Swift fan, until recently. I’m not exactly her target demographic.

During her Miami leg of the Eras Tour, my friends surprised me with tickets. That night, as we approached the stadium, I was astonished by the ocean of sparkles flowing from every direction into the arena. It was positively cult-like and beautiful to see so many girls and women declaring with their dresses: I shine. We shine.

Meanwhile, a heckler circled above in a small plane with a banner mocking her for being a cat lady. Yes, actually.

The minute she came onto the stage, I understood why she threatened someone enough to spend money on aerial harassment. She isn't just a musician—she is a revolution.

There are elements of shamanic ceremony that she had mastered to an incredible degree:
The way every single person in the stadium knew every word of every song, unifying the voice of 65,000.
The sameness of the sparkles, creating visual cohesion.
The friendship bracelets being traded from fan to fan.

Her positivity was relentless, released like a floodgate of the divine. It was sent pulsing through every crevice of the arena and created an epic force field of heart and mind cohesion.

And Taylor herself—she commands a stage with power beyond any healer, sage, shaman, or teacher I have ever encountered. Her energy is precise, razor-sharp, and totally entrancing. We entered a prolonged trance state that night, guided by her music.

There were moments when it was just her alone on stage with a guitar, and moments when she was surrounded by a deluge of dancers. When Florence Welch emerged from the floor for a single song (Florida), if anyone had doubted they were in the presence of witches, there was no way to doubt it after seeing those two conjure their power together.

It wasn't just a swirl of silk and sound—it was a transmission.

As I stood there in awe, it became abundantly clear: Taylor is a shaman, and she is entraining an entire generation of young women with new codes of how to be a woman. Codes of power, codes of divine feminine consciousness, codes of how to flirt, how to fight, how to live, how to mourn, how to be.

It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It gave me hope for the future.

Her songs might sound like pop music until you unlock the transmission within them—then they reveal themselves to be medicine.

The Teaching

Here was a man flying a plane above, burning fossil fuels to taunt the goddess herself, and she was unfazed, unfettered—too busy laying down teachings to transform the next generation of girls into giants to be bothered by the haters.

This is why Taylor came to me in this moment of mourning, of loss, of sobriety. I was watching this medicine family struggle with their teacher's transgression—trying to fit it into boxes—'bad,' 'not so bad,' or 'maybe okay.'

Trying to reconcile their image of an evolved shaman with the revelation of an imperfect man.
Trying to reconcile their love of sacred medicines with their doubt in the lineage that holds them.
Trying to reconcile indigenous ways with Western therapeutic boundaries.
Trying to reconcile a lineage that is acutely patriarchal with the obvious need for feminine influence.

Meanwhile, the feminine is rising—but not in the traditional healing maloka.
It’s rising in a stadium.

My friend’s death was a gift to me and all those who brought her ashes home. Death medicine is clarifying. We don't have forever to figure out how to care properly for this planet, and we don't have infinite days to awaken to our own true nature. We are on an hourglass timer and nobody knows how much sand is left.

Her death made that abundantly clear.

We don't have time to waste on old ways of awakening that are embroiled in recalcitrant traditions.

No. It's time to find the new wave of teachers—the ones who teach in ordinary ways, like pop music.

Taylor—from one older witch to a younger—I salute you. May all the covens of elders weave protection around you as you change the universe one song at a time.

Alchemy On.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

My husband and I spent last weekend with two other couples—one of the most profound ways to truly know your friends.

While dinner parties crack open windows into friendship, weekend mornings spent in robes over coffee, stretching into late nights by the fire when no one wants to surrender the warmth of connection—this is where love reveals itself as a shared language.

What delighted me most was observing how distinctly different each woman was from the others.

In our playful taxonomy, we christened ourselves: the shaman, the slut, and the scientist. I claimed the spiritual realm, another embodied the sensual, and our third friend wielded research like the sociology doctorate she is. Our debates crackled with energy: is sex spiritual? I insisted yes. My sensual friend argued no, while our scientist attempted to referee with statistics and studies about primate mating habits.

There's undeniable beauty in seeking friends who mirror us—those kindred spirits born from the same star, vibrating at our frequency. Sometimes at parties or large dinners, I listen beneath the surface chatter to the deeper tonal currents of each voice. These undertones reveal not geographic origins but something more essential—which cosmic frequency birthed them. I can often match people from similar wavelengths, and they inevitably become fast friends.

It's comforting to tweet alongside birds of identical feather. But the universe craves symphony, and the most exquisite music emerges when different birds flock together.

If you fancy yourself a wizard, content only among fellow wizards while dismissing the muggles—let me share a secret: the muggles are extraordinary. The muggle is you, is all of us. When we abandon these rigid categories of acceptability—who dresses like us, eats like us, thinks like us—we discover something profound.

The real magic lives in the liminal spaces between our mental constructs and definitions.

Last night, I hosted my dear friend's fiftieth birthday celebration. She invited sixty women to my home—most strangers to me, friends gathered from every decade of her life while I represent only the most recent chapter. College friends mingled with mom friends, soul sisters with creative collaborators, medicine women with professional colleagues. They were all dressed in white, creating quite the vision.

When our DJ began, I immediately judged him—it sounded like bar mitzvah music. My pretentious mind preferred French techno to his eighties repertoire. Meanwhile, sixty women in white kicked off their shoes and danced for hours. We moved through every anthem of the eighties and nineties imaginable.

Then "Livin' on a Prayer" began, and something transcendent happened.

We sang every single word at the top of our lungs—a choir that could make angels weep with joy. Their voices vibrated through my entire home, rattling the rafters, and I felt blessing itself entering through the frequency of our collective song, amplified by synchronized, euphoric jumping.

Here I'd been paying various practitioners to bless my home with sage and crystals, sprinkling salt around the perimeter—yet the most powerful blessing came from a group of mothers belting Bon Jovi with abandon.

What is spiritual? What is not?
This is the question I leave with you, dear readers.

Let's be brave enough to release these definitions. Those of us who consider ourselves spiritual carry a particular arrogance—we believe we're the wizards. Fucking nonsense.

And those who insist they're "not spiritual"—I have news for you. Every human being, regardless of where they stand on the journey, is a time bomb primed for awakening. It's only a matter of when, never if.

One husband from our weekend repeatedly insisted he wasn't spiritual "at all." He said this while sitting in his exquisitely tended garden—a space so lovingly cultivated, I'm convinced millions of fairies inhabit it—surrounded by friends who've loved him unconditionally for decades. A man enveloped by nature and devoted friendship? I would call him deeply spiritual indeed.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

One camp advocated "cry it out"—a euphemism for leaving your newborn to wail until they learn to "self-soothe" and conform to a schedule. This approach promised rest for mothers and nervous system regulation that would supposedly serve children long-term.

The opposing philosophy was attachment parenting, where infants were never left to cry themselves to sleep but instead kept close to skin and breath, comforted on demand.

Since babies cannot articulate their needs and the science remained conflicted, choosing between these approaches required pure instinct. During pregnancy, I found this deeply confusing—reading countless books that championed either method without being able to discern which was truly better. But once my son arrived, the choice became crystal clear. Letting him cry felt entirely unnatural, regardless of what other parents believed. My instinct led me toward attachment, and I never regretted following it.

Parenting is a minefield of choices. Styles cycle through generations like fashion trends—one generation spoils, the next disciplines. But both miss the essential point.

The Brine They Soak In

It matters less what we do to our children than who we are to them.

We exhaust ourselves fretting over the mechanics of child-rearing—which school, which sport, which activities—while neglecting to examine our own consciousness, the very brine our children marinate in from conception onward.

You cannot fake consciousness; it transmits with complete transparency who you truly are.

Now, close to launching my eldest son into the world, I'm surrounded by advice about what mothers are supposed to do to ensure successful launches. The college preparation industry particularly pressures parents to view teenagers as bundles of resources to be optimized rather than emerging souls to be awakened.

Amid all the pressure to find the perfect summer program to help my son excel in this extractive paradigm, I chose the opposite path.

I sent him to apprentice with different forms of masculine consciousness—to absorb their way of being rather than merely their way of doing.

Lessons from the Wild

When I was in my twenties, I fell in love with a mountain climber in Chile. He was a master of the wild, able to traverse the tundra for days without maps. My suburban self was laughably inexperienced beside him—a constant source of gentle amusement.

I didn't know how to gather clean water, navigate terrain, pack efficiently, or even walk properly in wilderness. He taught me to trust my feet by demonstrating his absolute trust in his own.

Sometimes he would glance at me sideways, smiling, as I slid down muddy slopes with my pack threatening to topple me, as if to ask, "Don't you know how to live?" The truth was, I didn't. He taught me not through words but in the silence between them. In the spaciousness he created by moving with such stillness through the vast Patagonian wilderness that was his home.

I remember scaling a wind-whipped mountain for hours, passing puma caves and condor nests, when I spotted a tiny crystal in the brush. "Maybe I'm starting to get it," I thought, because finally I could see what stillness reveals—a one-inch quartz hidden among the scrub.

He showed me that grace lives in the very way our feet meet the earth. Ever since, I've held at arm's length anyone who stomps through life, anyone who has forgotten how to dance.

Spirit Over Skills

I always imagined sending my children to learn from him, but decades later, we lost touch. While our culture obsesses over internships for college applications, we've nearly abandoned the ancient art of apprenticeships that prepare young people to become conscious beings.

Each summer, I've encouraged my son to shadow different humans—sobriety coaches, healers, business leaders, investors, or simply those who are wild and awake. In each apprenticeship, I hoped he would absorb their way of being, their consciousness. It was always more about spirit than skills.

I have only one year left before my first son leaves home. The bulk of parenting lies behind me; his future belongs more to him than to me now.

If I could offer one piece of guidance to parents beginning this journey, it would be this: the quality of your consciousness will impact who your children become more than any other factor. This doesn't require perfection—it requires the profound authenticity of showing up as your truest self and letting that light shine through, unfiltered.

The children are always soaking in the brine of who we are.
So let it be sacred. Let it be real.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Last week, I was sitting in a train car watching the city pass before my eyes when suddenly, I felt a spiritual download come into my awareness. It felt like the universe was talking to me—a felt sense of words more than words themselves.

What those words said to me was:
​“Don’t be such a show-off.”

I hadn’t thought of that pejorative in a long time. A "show-off" was what we called someone in middle school who liked to talk about themselves and flaunt their material stuff. I don’t think of myself as one, not particularly.

And yet, over the next few hours, it felt as if I were being internally worked by some kind of force—an invisible teacher.

When I spoke, I could hear the show-off in my words.
When I walked, I could feel the show-off in the way I moved my body.
When I went to pay for an iced tea, I saw the ring on my finger showing off as I swiped my card.

Even deeper, I could see the way my mind was constantly looking for ways to be seen and recognized and valued.

We move through life accumulating identities through our experiences. The mind is in charge of this process.

We go to a store to buy a Gucci purse and feel more Gucci after we buy it. Then the mind thinks to itself, “I am a Gucci type of person.”

We suffer a tragedy, and the mind forms an identity around being a broken person, which is one of the hardest identities to shed because there are a lot of rewards to being the broken one.

What I hadn’t seen until that afternoon was how deeply I had attached to this particular identity.

As it began to illuminate, I could see all the way back to a very young version of myself who wanted to be seen. I think most of us have some lost, little, young parts of ourselves that are hungering to be seen.

Left unattended, they sprout defense mechanisms—in my case, being a show-off.

It’s called growing up. This process of growing up is one of investigating each of the young, disenfranchised parts of ourselves with adult eyes.

As the little girl who wants to be seen dissolves into the light of my heart, she no longer needs to show off. Instead, she can turn her attention to seeing others—and letting them show off.

How beautiful to take a need to be seen and turn it into a superpower: to see.

We are moving through space and time, accumulating more and more layers of identity until we wake up. You know you are seeing through the eyes of one of your accumulated identities by the way you feel in your body.

If you are feeling anxious or angry or hopeless, you are most definitely inside of an identity. If you are raging against something that happened to you that you wish didn’t, you are inside of an identity.

It is when we accept that all things that come to us are for us—when we accept all outcomes—then we can taste peace.

As we let the layers of identity melt like ice cubes in summer heat, something ineffable remains.

Enjoy the quench of spirit that remains.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

Do you remember the endless summers of childhood, when days seemed to stretch on forever? Hours dripped like honey, slow and sweet, abundant with possibilities. We didn’t yet have calendars packed with deadlines, hearts wound tight with urgency, or phones buzzing every few minutes. We were more present then—and presence made time feel full.

But now? Weeks blur. Months vanish. And we find ourselves whispering, almost in disbelief: “Where did all that time go?”

Here’s the tender truth: the secret to experiencing an abundance of time lies not in making more of it, but in reclaiming your attention.

Time is collective, but your attention is yours alone.

All humans struggle with the same thing: time and attention. We are each allotted just so much time for this life; we don’t know how much we have. But we do know this: attention is the unit of time that we actually own. When your attention is whole and undivided, your moments stretch. When it’s split—by dings, scrolls, the pull to do ten things at once—your days collapse in on themselves.

In our accelerated modern world, attention is splintered into smaller and smaller shards. Every phone notification, every anxious thought, every mental to-do pulls us out of presence. And without presence, there is no real experience of time—just the illusion of speed.

This isn’t just about technology or busyness. It’s also how we approach healing, growth, and the sacred work of becoming. We want transformation fast. We want to feel better now. We pray once and expect the ache to dissolve by morning. But the truth is...

Time is an ingredient of change.

You can’t rush a pregnancy. You can’t fast-forward a tree from seed to bloom. And you can’t microwave spiritual evolution. In this world, healing begins in the energetic realm but must pass through the density of matter, the laws of biology, the rhythm of the soul’s unfolding.

The virtue of patience is not a passive waiting—it’s an active trust in the cosmic design.

Stillness is how we begin to experience that trust. When we pause, when we sit in full presence, our perception of time expands. Our consciousness deepens. The moment becomes vibrant, alive. Not because we did more—but because we were there for it.

Stillness is not the absence of doing. It’s the fullness of being. It’s spiritual integrity. It’s medicine.

Let this week be a quiet devotion to your own attention. Let stillness return you to the abundance of time you once knew.

Here's to the stillness of summer.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

I just got back from MAPS 2025, where I gave this talk: “When to Trust a Vision.” It’s something I’ve felt in my bones for years—maybe lifetimes—waiting for the moment to speak it out loud.

This isn’t just a talk for psychedelic spaces. It’s for anyone who’s ever had a deep knowing arrive unannounced. A dream. A whisper. A sense. Something so clear and wild and inconvenient you almost didn’t trust it.

I share stories—from a botched ceremony that turned sacred, to a message from my deceased grandmother that broke me open. We talk oracles, community, humility, and the wild process of learning to become someone who can actually hold a vision.

And yes, apparently, becoming someone who can hold a vision also involves lipstick.

If you’re navigating your own unfolding—if you’ve been asking what’s real, what matters, and what’s yours to carry—I hope this meets you there.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia

When To Trust A Vision

The last time I spoke at MAPS, I presented right after Amanda Fielding. She was about to speak when suddenly she came off the stage, looked me directly in the eyes, and confessed—half-laughing, half-worried—that she was “a bit too enhanced” and wasn’t sure she could talk. But after a moment of centering herself, she delivered a flawless discourse on the foundations of psychedelic science and why humanity needs them now more than ever.

Amanda was speaking from vision. Many visions, in fact—gathered over a lifetime of exploration.

Rick Doblin, too, operates from vision—a single, unwavering one. If you’ve experienced healing through MDMA, you are living evidence of that vision. So, take a moment in your heart and send him your gratitude. Rick’s vision won’t cross the finish line on capital alone—it will require the collective prayers of our community. So send him one now.

Which brings me to today’s inquiry: When do we trust a vision?

There’s a quote I love from Black Elk:

“For a vision to have power, it must be performed on earth.”

What does that mean for us—ordinary, imperfect humans, shaped by ego and identity—when we are also designed to receive visions? We are vision-making machines. Psychedelics can sharpen and illuminate those visions with breathtaking clarity. And yet, we’ve all seen the flip side: the spiritual narcissist who follows ego-fueled visions to the point of delusion. For every true visionary, there’s a guy at a party claiming he’s God after a DMT breakthrough—without noticing he forgot to put on pants.

I live by vision. It guides much of my life. But I’ve stumbled plenty along the way and made many mistakes in working from visions.

A few years ago, I was leading a ceremony overseas for a group of mega powerful women. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to be a “good facilitator.” But two hours in, and no-one felt a thing. One even tapped her watch and asked if it was okay to grab a glass of rosé.

Then one of them came up to me and said, “I think I know what’s going on. Mind if I speak to the women?”

I had never handed over the ceremony reins to someone else—certainly not someone I barely knew—but something about her presence compelled me. What happened next was miraculous.

This woman opened a channel—something ancient, oracular. The energy shifted instantly. Everyone entered a shared healing space. She had become the lead, and I, the receiver. The Oracle of Delphi had appeared in my ceremony. The actual spirit of the oracle herself.

The Delphic Oracle—the Pythia—was once the spiritual center of the ancient world. Kings and generals consulted her on all matters of state. She sat on a tripod, inhaling ethylene gases rising from the bedrock, and spoke visions interpreted by a surrounding council. She wasn’t alone. Her visions were refined in community of priests.

When the Oracle spoke in my ceremony, she had a message—for me. Let’s be honest: in the moment it felt less like a sacred temple experience and more like a scene from Kill Bill. This vision was coming through a woman from Berlin who liked to drink Negronis and chain-smoke Gitanes. But still—it was real. I could never again doubt the legitimacy of vision after hearing her counsel to me, so precise, so utterly accurate.

That moment catalyzed my study of the Delphic tradition. I began to ask:

In what kind of world did kings consult chemically enhanced visions?

The Oracle served for nearly 2,000 uninterrupted years. Originally a cult of Gaia, the symbol of Delphi was the python—before it became a temple to Apollo. The priestess lived in celibacy and renunciation. I don’t think we need such austerity today—but her life reminds us that to trust vision required discipline, practice, and community.

Visionaries don’t operate solo. The Oracle always worked with a council.
No one’s vision lives apart.

A vision is not yours. It is a thread of the collective. You are simply the first to hear what the universe is whispering.

Three Delphic maxims were inscribed at the temple:

• “Know thyself”

• “Nothing in excess”

• “Surety brings ruin”

These aren’t abstract. They are practical tools for refining a vision:

Know thyself warns us against ego inflation and spiritual bypass. Yes, your vision might tell you you’re divine—which is the actual truth of your soul— but if you’re shouting “I’m God” at a party, you might be having a manic break.

Nothing in excess reminds us of balance. Civilized psychedelic life doesn’t look like microdosing ketamine every 20 minutes to maintain connection to source. The Pythia channeled visions just nine times a year.

Surety brings ruin means we must consult, collaborate, and stay humble. Visions need to be vetted in community to find their truest expression and none of us alone hold the certainty on anything ever.

Historically, vision and practicality were not separate. The hunter received guidance from psychedelics on where to find the game. Joan of Arc was led by vision at thirteen to reinstall the Dauphin. Steve Jobs built Apple after being inspired by LSD visions. Yet today, vision is marginalized and the frameworks in which they functioned have been erased. Intuition is dismissed. The modern visionary is often labeled neurodivergent or a witch.

Why?

Because in a society driven by extraction and control, the visionary is unwelcome. The Emperor Theodosius knew this when he shut down the Delphic temple with a “big beautiful law” to consolidate Christian power—and with it his tax base via tithing. He commanded the end of the Delphi, and the destruction of their temple. The oracles were buried—literally. A city was built on top of them, including a building materials quarry over what had once been the heart of their sacred temple.

Visionaries have been homeless ever since. Where does the visionary belong in a society that believes in science above spirit?

The visionary capacity has been diminished and “othered”. The modern visionary numbs her gifts because there is no culture for her visions to live in. Or the vision comes through a fragmented ego that reflects the fragmentation of society and runs a high risk of spiritual bypass.

Vision is not just marginalized, it is also untrained. Are you a visionary after one single psychedelic experience or ten or a hundred or none? Where can we restore the training required to consult a vision? Native American culture was very obedient to the visionary but that person went through profound rites of passage to prepare herself to deliver them.

That’s why I turn back to the wisdom of Delphi. Visions need community. They need accountability. They need time. They are seeds. We are the bridge between sacred and mundane—walking horizontally through daily life while reaching vertically into the divine. In community—the horizontal plane—a vision can take root. Like biodynamic farming, a vision must be ecological, holistic, and ethical—in harmony with cosmic rhythms.

Vision is not about personal transformation. It is about a surrender to truth.

Truth is uncomfortable. It’s not about “being your best self.”

Most visions stretch beyond a single lifetime, which is why they must be held in collective trust, just like we can preserve soil to last for generations.

One of our family stories is about my rabbinical great grandfathers death. He was with his synagogue when he predicted that he would die later that day and told them as much. He went home, lay down on the living room floor surrounded by his family, and said, “the angels are coming for me”, and then died. My grandmother, someone I rejected when I was younger because she always smelt like dried herbs from the medicinal concoctions she would brew, was often consulted by rabbis herself for her visions. “If you want to talk to God, they would say, ask Gohar—she has the direct line.”

She passed away when I was already a mother myself. I think that her last teaching to me was one day when I came to see her with my toddler son, exhausted and depleted. She turned to me from her chair and said, “Sylvia, you should really put on some lipstick.”

She was a visionary in her own right but after she passed away I didn’t feel especially connected to her. However, something strange started to happen in my visions after she passed away. I would often see an indistinct pattern, something akin to a butterfly wing or the grain of wood on a tree. I could never see beyond that pattern, leaving me with the chilling question of, what is behind this pattern?

For over a decade after she passed I never saw beyond that pattern. Then, one day, when I was in a deep process, my vision opened beyond that pattern and it revealed itself as a pattern in the crown of my deceased grandmother. The crown was made of pearls and feathers, and as the vision expanded, I could see that she presided over some kind of court of atonement in the astral realm from where she was gazing at—and in fact—judging me. She was weighing me, considering my worthiness to receive her wisdom.

She spoke to me then, saying these words: “Sylvia, in the past, I could not send you any deep visions because you were not ready to hold them. You were like a colander, having too little backbone to hold water. You did not even know the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. You are just starting to learn, and now you are becoming like a well made clay pot, ready to hold what I can give. From now onwards, I will guide you, especially your attention moment to moment. If you want to know what matters most and where to spend your time, you have only to consult the vision with me.”

That was the moment I understood: Vision is earned. It requires initiation. A strong practice. Integration. Community. And Prayer. And apparently, a little lipstick.

So I offer you this prayer:

May your visions come.
May they be held in integrity.
May they be refined in community.
May they serve something larger than yourself.

Because it will take vision for humanity to survive.

May you be one of those who hears what the universe is whispering—and dares to bring it to Earth.