There is a kind of naked that has nothing to do with skin. Soul Naked is that invitation, whispered through every post and story and small teaching I place in my feeds like seeds pressed into soil.
Wake up. Like the sun.
Not once, on a retreat, when the conditions are finally right. Every single day, in the middle of your actual life. Free. Open source. No teacher required, nothing to buy, nothing to change, nothing to earn before you’re allowed to wake up.
The sun doesn’t ask permission to rise. It doesn’t wait for you to deserve it, or for yesterday’s clouds to clear first. It just arrives, again and again, without apology. That’s the kind of awakening available to all of us: not one blinding flash of enlightenment, but a daily, humble willingness to rise again anyway.
Every teaching, every caption, every voice note I sent out this summer kept circling back to the same three doors. I call them the three realms of consciousness, though really, they were never mine to name. All summer I checked in with myself. Am I in one of these? And when I wasn’t, there was one line I kept coming back to:
“Sylvia, you are in a space of trigger/ego/fixation. Take a deep breath, and return.”
All summer I practiced sustaining that awakening moment by moment. And when I lost it, I practiced something harder: taking full responsibility for coming back, no excuses, no spiraling into self-judgment. Just returning.
Return.
Acceptance. The ground floor of the temple. Not resignation, not giving up. Just the moment you stop fighting what’s already true. The traffic. The diagnosis. The way they didn’t call. Acceptance is the smallest choice you’ll make all day, and it’s free: stop wasting your life arguing with reality.
Enjoyment. Once you stop bracing against what is, you can actually taste it. The coffee. The ocean air on your skin. The song that comes on right when you need it. Enjoyment isn’t something you earn after enough suffering. It’s a muscle, and you strengthen it by noticing pleasure in the smallest, most available places, over and over, all day long.
Enthusiasm. The realm most of us abandon first, because somewhere along the way we were taught it’s for children and beginners. But enthusiasm is life force with nowhere left to hide. It’s the energy that moves through you the instant you stop managing your image and start living from what actually lights you up, letting your inner purpose finally show up in your outer life.
These three aren’t a staircase you climb once. They’re a loop you walk daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes minute to minute. You accept the traffic, then you enjoy the song on the radio, then enthusiasm shows up uninvited because you rolled the window down. That’s the whole practice. It always was this simple.
Awakening doesn’t require money, time off, a retreat, a guru, or a better life than the one you’re currently living. It requires noticing. A breath before you speak. A hand on your own heart. Gratitude for the water when you wash your face. Looking someone in the eye and actually seeing them. None of it costs anything. All of it is the practice.
This past week, a glacier let go in the Himalayas, and a wall of water and debris tore down through the valleys along the Nepal-Tibet border, sweeping away entire villages in minutes. More than a thousand people are confirmed dead, thousands more remain missing, and families on both sides of that border are still searching for people they love in the mud.
I’m not telling you this to frighten you. I’m telling you because it’s true, and truth is the whole point of this work. A valley can be calm and green and full of pilgrims in the morning, and gone by afternoon. A river can rise without asking permission. None of us are promised the next hour, let alone the next season.
This is not a reason for despair. It is the reason for reverence.
Every ordinary Tuesday you’re given is not ordinary. It’s the whole gift. So hold Rasuwa and Gyirong in your heart today. Send what you can: a prayer, a donation, your attention. Let their grief soften you instead of numbing you. Let it make you gentler with the people already in your home tonight. That’s what compassion is actually for. Not something we perform, but something we owe, paid back by loving the people in front of us more fully while we still have the chance.
A place to send your light
If you’re looking for somewhere to put that donation, I want to point you toward GivePower. They build solar microgrids in exactly the kind of remote, disaster-hit places the news moves on from fastest, including two villages in Nepal already: Bagara, where an 18kW system now powers a school and a clinic, and Mahji Goan, where solar power restored a whole village’s ability to earn a living. Giving to GivePower helps fund the kind of emergency solar rebuild that communities along the Trishuli are going to need for months, maybe years, after the cameras leave. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s actual light, for people who need it in the most literal sense there is. If the sunshine in your pocket has any weight to it, that’s where I’d send it. You can give directly at givepower.org.
Five years ago I went to Nepal with GivePower to help install solar power in a village myself. This is what it looked like:
Give Power Nepal
Entering the dark half of the year
The light is starting to turn now. The days will keep shortening. We are walking, as we do every year, out of the realm of the sun and into the realm of the dark, the season that asks us to go inward, to rest, to sit with what the summer revealed.
So before we cross that threshold together, I want to leave you with this.
Hold the sunshine in your pocket.
Not as a metaphor to admire, but as a literal daily practice. Take one moment of light, warmth, or joy from today, and tuck it away on purpose, the way you’d pocket a stone from a beach you loved. When the dark months come, and they will, you won’t be without light. You’ll be carrying your own.
Don’t save your awakening for the retreat, the new year, the better circumstances, the more spiritual version of yourself. Share it now. Freely. Messily. In the group chat and the grocery line and the hard conversation with your mother. In how you drive, how you tip, how you listen. Let it leak out of you in ordinary moments, all day, every day, not because you’re losing something by giving it away, but because that’s the entire purpose of having any light at all.
You’re not naked because you’re exposed. You’re naked because you finally stopped hiding.
Welcome to the other side of summer. Bring your sunshine. We’re going to need it.
Help bring the light to Nepal ✨
GivePower is raising $87,000 to power five temporary community shelters, three schools, a ward office and a base shelter, for the families displaced by the Bhote Koshi flood. Every gift goes toward solar systems that will keep serving these communities long after the emergency has passed.