We call it the “terrible twos,” but that chaos is actually transformation — the brain reorganizing itself, perception expanding, awareness awakening. Adulthood isn’t so different. Growth doesn’t end; it just changes form. What looks like falling apart is often a nervous system trying to rebuild. If we can stay curious through uncertainty, loss, and reorganization, life keeps offering new colors to see. Every hard season asks for the same patience we give a child learning to walk — the same grace, curiosity, and tenderness. Growth isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. We keep turning two again and again — learning, unlearning, breaking, healing, and seeing the world, and ourselves, with new eyes.

We often think good parents are wise, patient, and endlessly selfless. But more often, they’re tired, uncertain, and learning in real time — fumbling through love and fear, hoping not to repeat what hurt them. Rebellion arrives right on schedule, the proof that their children feel safe enough to push away. Anger isn’t disrespect; it’s a declaration of becoming. What we call “defiance” is often courage in disguise — the child’s first attempt at freedom.

Pain passes quietly through generations, disguised as protection, as pride, as silence. The work of parenting is noticing where it lives in you, and choosing not to hand it forward. Healing your own wounds is how you protect your child’s. Sometimes the best you can do is give them a better basket of bad — fewer ghosts, more grace.

We call it parenting. But it’s really apprenticeship — to love, to humility, to letting go. Every generation gets another chance to get it a little less wrong. Will you take yours?

We often think monsters are rare and terrifying. But more often, they’re painfully ordinary — mediocre cowards shaped by shame, propped up by systems that normalize harm and call it protection. Predators are often celebrated, their entitlement assumed, while their enablers train others to become prey. Generational harm continues unspoken, unquestioned, and shame moves silently through bloodlines.

Shame doesn’t disappear. It becomes a haunting presence, living in the background of our relationships, our choices, our inner lives. It turns into compulsions, projections, and addictions. It deteriorates our bodies, confuses our minds, isolates our hearts. Eventually, it forms the blueprint for how we treat ourselves and others, and we call it normal. We call it life.

This is the shame cycle: first we become victims, then cowards, and often, bullies. Our wounds become weapons. Silence becomes tradition. Harm is disguised — and often celebrated — as protection. Sometimes all three roles live in us at once, shaping how we love, parent, worship, and survive. We cling to rules and certainty, mistaking control for safety, terrified of facing what lies underneath.

To those who know they’re hiding, who feel the pull toward honesty, reckoning, and healing, to drag long-held secrets into the light — liberation isn’t easy. It asks for grief, risk, and radical responsibility. But it’s possible. And it’s waiting. Do you want your liberation? It wants you.

Critical thinking only begins when we’re willing to find out we’re wrong. … If we can’t question our “facts,” or shift our values, our policies become rigid. Destructive. Oppressive.

Here’s a foundation of critical thinking that allows us to think about our own thinking:

Facts. A fact is a statement about something most people can observe. If a large enough pool of evidence supports it, we call it “true.” If not, “false.”

Most of us can’t see what lies beyond our lenses of perception, belief, and belonging. Not because we’re stupid or stubborn, but because it destabilizes us. This is does not indicate danger is lurking in the unknown. It’s just our fear of the unknown. We’re scared. Which leads us to…

Values. Our values shape how we see the world and ourselves. Our values cause us to double-down on our lenses of perception, belief, and belonging that skew facts. Our values are conditioned and usually go unquestioned, unless there’s an uncomfortable event that forces reflection. Which leads us to…

Policies. Policies are values in action. They’re what we think we should do. They shape everyday behaviors, habits, laws, institutions. If we can’t question our “facts” and adjust our values, our policies become rigid. Destructive. Oppressive.

Capacity for healthy feeling, emotional regulation, and willingness to be wrong is PREREQUISITE to clear, powerful thinking. All of life exists in relationship and resonance. …

That old saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Welp. The self-help, pop-psychology, alternative thinking world - Caroline Myss, Esther Hicks, Ernest Holmes, even Joe Dispenza (the most expensive voice in the game) - is repackaging of threads of ancient truths.

Rooted in ancient teachings from Indigenous people, Sufism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and more. All searching for a connection to something greater than themselves that enables them to know “God.” All eventually shaped, broken, or erased by quests for control, power, and domination (the politics of their time).

That doesn’t mean the new stuff isn’t helpful. It can be. That doesn’t mean all the old stuff is “truth” either.

What know for sure, no one actually knows much.
Not me. Not Dr. Joe Dispenza. Not the Pope.
The sheer magnitude of what can be known, renders it unknowable… and in constant motion.
We get glimpses. Temporary clarity.

However, if we decide this glimpse is the mountaintop. We have arrived, the ordained keepers of truth. Expect a mudslide.

Truth does not like to be caged.

But, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like relief for someone to lie to me and to believe my total life solution only costs $39.99 (or name your price.. I am in).

“… Most of what we call ‘normal’ in our interactions is deeply conditioned. We’re trained by our systems - education, media, culture, family - to know our place, play our part, follow the script. That conditioning isn't random. It exists to shape how we perceive, assign power, define identity, and most of all preserve the system itself.

So when we’re suddenly outside that script, when someone doesn’t follow the expected norms, or when a space behaves differently than we’re used to, it triggers anxiety. Not because anything’s truly wrong, but because we’ve been coached to believe something is.

That’s cognitive dissonance.
That’s the signal.
It’s not proof something’s broken.
It’s proof we’ve been trained.

And once a system becomes our “reality,” challenging it feels like betrayal. People who question it get dismissed, attacked, or worse. Because dismantling what we’ve internalized isn’t just uncomfortable, it threatens the identity we’ve wrapped around it. …”

Systems are a collective ego. …

“… I think of karma is embodied learning. This means it is alive. In our bodies. Beyond all the ways we love to believe we can control what’s happening with our thoughty thoughts. The way our soul is unmistakably beckoning us to better, expansion, transformation, A MIRACLE.

Karmic looping, which psychology calls repetition compulsion or trauma reenactment, is what’s up when we resist how bad the pile of shit stinks. We leave it there. We hide it. We insist we didn’t create that pile, they (insert any they) did it.

There’s no wrong here. There’s no wrong in finding yourself in the same wretched situation for the umpteenth time. Every time you find yourself there it’s a beautiful choice point. Are you going to put your pile in shit in your pocket and carry it around? Or, are you ready to be the person for the job? Because the job’s calling. You’ve been hired. …”