I woke this morning at 6:30 AM to a message from a new friend who’d already been digging on the flats beyond my cabin for hours, asking if he and his wife could bring me over a basket of fresh clams.

Today, the skies are heavy again with smoke from the Canadian fires, a data center the size of two Manhattans has been approved in my drought-sieged motherland of Utah, a young mother and little daughter here in Maine are torn apart with grief after ICE agents shot her husband dead, and we’re all trying to hold the chaos of grief and fury and sorrow without letting it consume us.

When my friend Tom—who is 80 years old and still clams every day, who grew up without indoor plumbing, who worked as the custodian for 35 years at the local elementary school—showed up an hour later with a tray of fresh-scrubbed sweet clams straight from the flats outside my door, I just about broke into tears.

This is the message, the prayer, that Love delivered to my door this morning in the weathered hands of a man who lives each day by the tides:

Hold open your heart.

Be undone by your love, which sometimes feels like anger, and often feels like grief.

Start your day by asking “how will beauty surprise me today?” and be on the lookout for your answer.

Welcome Love’s gifts, which are everywhere.

Let your tears fall.

Let rage move through you as song or dance or sweat or hard work with your hands.

Hold your heartbreak like a precious treasure, like a tiny bird, like the lock of your father’s hair you cut on his deathbed to keep forever.

Marvel at the sunrise, at the eyes of those who’ve lived for decades more than you, at the plate of shining clams in your hands.

Offer the gift.
Make the effort.
Take the time.
Hear the story.
Be moved to tears.
Believe in beauty.

Much love,
Kirstin

P.S. If you’d like to come home to your heart with me on this breathtaking land on the coast of Maine, I’ve got ONE spot left for my Wild Heart Intensive this summer or early fall. And if you like fresh clams, Tom will gladly bring us more! Schedule a call with me here to start the convo, or simply reply to the email.

For as long as we’ve existed, humans have been drawn to places on earth that call us, inexplicably, home.

Wild spaces where our burdens are lifted, where the myopia of selfhood is dwarfed by a sense of belonging both ancient and familiar: caves, mountaintops, glades, deserts, watersheds—lands that function as gateways to remembrance, to a divine consciousness from which we’re forged but often forget.

Over time, we deem these places sacred. We mark them with drawings, petroglyphs, tombs, labyrinths, symbols, shrines, temples, and churches. We adorn them with altars and offerings. We make pilgrimages to these sites. Often, the more sacred we consider a place to be, the more obscured the original portal becomes—the untamed, unnamed wild that beckoned us there in the first place.

The wild reminds us that innocence and ecstasy go hand in hand, that abundance is nature’s blueprint, and that purity is eros embodied, not repressed.

This is why I go early every morning, rain or shine, to water’s edge—to feel the salt on my tongue, the pine in my hair, the volcanic rock against my back—because when I start my days this way I remember who I am: undivided, whole, coherent, alive.

Held by the wild, my fears dissolve into faith. Bliss becomes my birthright. I feel both indelibly me and part of an infinite weave, a fractal of Source energy.

In short, I know myself as innately good, and complete.

Such knowing is the bane of every paradigm that seeks to control and extract the wild in all its forms—nature, women’s bodies, sexuality, indigenous wisdom, imagination, and intuition.

It’s also, I believe, what women today both remember and crave when we finally stop to honor the voice that’s been telling us something’s missing.

This is why I created The Wild Heart VIP Intensive, a bespoke two-day private immersion with me on the breathtaking coast of Maine, on the land that’s shown me again and again who I am and why I’m here.

For years (decades!) I’ve dreamt of bringing women to this sacred place. The last stretch of undeveloped coast on the entire eastern seaboard, it’s wild, untamed, on the outer edge—yet its wildness is inviting; it calls you in, holds you close, and returns you to wonder.

Nothing—no person, program, prayer or practice—has been more medicinal or inspirational to me than this place. Perhaps the energy I feel here is what led the Wabanaki, the “People of the Dawn,” to name it “The Land of Watching and Waiting” thousands of years before European colonists arrived.

A true co-creation with sacred place, the Wild Heart Intensive is a threshold between the life you’ve been living and the life that’s asking to be lived—an encounter with the whole ecology of your being, guided and supported by tree elders, ocean voices, teeming earth, and land spirits.

Because this Intensive is entirely customized, I host only a small number between June and October.

I have just two spots left for 2026.

Click here for details and to schedule a call. I’ve love to explore what’s possible when you come home to the wild.

Much love,
Kirstin

I’ve been on and hosted many pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world, but this one—an 11-day sojourn with my 85 year-old mom and my sister to our Motherlands in Utah—is the most meaningful, sacred, poignant one yet.

My mother, all red-headed 90 pounds of her, is fierce and tender. My childhood wasn’t easy. But I loved watching the way my father loved her: he saw her softness, he saw the girl in her, he safekept her vulnerability.

As he did with me. When my mother and I fought, it made my father deeply sad. In his older years, towards the end, when all of us, especially mom, were worn thin—tension between us made him cry.

I moved in with my mom 7 months ago, after dad died. I’ve made a studio apartment in the house I grew up in, in the big room that was once my dad’s office. Dozens of photos of my sister and me, from kindergarten on, still crowd the bookshelves. Mom and I have dinner most nights.

This has been the most humbling season of my life.

I’ve curled my body close to the dying, to death, to grief. I spend most of my time these days with women over 80. I see that no matter how well we love and tend and nourish our bodies, they break down, often in ways that are painful.

I see that our minds, once sharp and responsive, can lose their bearings, that dementia can visit the most nimble-minded among us. I’ve seen that aging, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, is inevitable, and hard.

I’ve also looked my fear of aging in the eye, and what I’ve seen has changed me: there’s something deeply confused about the current longevity quest and its biohacking trail guide. I’m all for vitality and living as long as I possibly can, for rejecting myths about what it means, especially for women, to grow older—

But there’s an energy that feels almost manic in today’s longevity trend. As my friend Nilesh reminded me today, what we strive for is what we suppress, and what I’ve seen inside of my own determination to outrun aging is a telling impatience that’s less about living and more about fear of the very limits that teach us how precious this life really is.

I’ve been to Utah many times—where my mother was raised on a road lined on both sides with family, beneath the Wasatch mountains where she loved to camp, “cowboy style,” under the stars.

But this time was different. I woke early every morning to drive up and down the roads she walked as a girl. I needed to know the lay of her land.

I pictured her on this corner, waiting for the school bus. I imagined her reading beneath the now-towering cottonwoods. I saw her, at sixteen, awash in grief and shock in the wake of her father’s sudden death, her teenage rebellion now emptied of meaning.

I offered rose petals to the trees that stand sentinel at my great-grandparents drive, next to the mansion that’s been built on top of the spot where my mother’s one story ranch once sat.

I prayed to the giant blue spruce that was planted when mom was born. I cried into the stream that still threads, through the “Friendly Opening,” the land of her childhood home to the lands of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I’m still discovering what it is I prayed for.

Yes, I prayed for our lineage—especially the line of “difficult” women reaching back as far as I can see. For the shadows they carried and buried in their wombs. For their pain. For their sublimated wellsprings of power and vision. For their resilience. For their yearnings.

For the gardens they grew and the beauty they tenderly, doggedly nurtured in soils nourished by equal parts love and loss.

My lineage. My blood.

I prayed for my future grandchildren and great grandchildren. I summoned love, imperfectly but honestly, and planted it there, in the wet grass, in the old beds of Lilly of the Valley, in the rubble where my great grandparents’ grand house once stood, at my grandparents’ graves, and in the wake of my mother’s slow shuffle-walk as she looked for the old rock garden where she was married in her parents back yard.

But I also prayed for something else.

For the fallibility and feltness of this human life.

For the strange, miraculous fact that I live in this body, am the daughter of this woman, came from these lands, am born of this history—

For the knowing that each of us is ripe with particularities that are wrenchingly beautiful.

For the nearly unnamable gift of my mother’s elder years and this chance I have to learn her, and love her—and be filled by her love—anew

Most of us relate to our yearning as lack: a symptom of not-having, a failure of full presence, or at best, a thirst to slake. As a result, our yearning can often feel like a slippery slope to scarcity, disappointment, and that awful feeling that our needs make us needy.

But what if your yearning, in its essence, is none of these things at all? What if your yearning is a spiritual superfood—dense with energetic nutrients that fortify wonder and awe, that embolden your authentic expression, and amplify your very aliveness?

I cannot tell you how many women come to me with a yearning for more—not more “success” as it’s typically measured, but … something more. Something that’s on the tips of their tongues yet hard to name.

… a feeling.
… a fullness.
… a soulfulness.
… a wildness.
… a softness.
… a freedom.
… a knowing.
… a trueness.

Most of the time, they want to “figure out” what’s missing in order to feel these things…

Their mission, the relationship, their healing, the move, new habits, new body…

But what I teach is that the something more you’re hungry for is already here, within you, waiting to be claimed—not by thinking it through with more precision but by learning to feel the incredible flow of life force moving in you

We can—and often do—yearn for something in particular, but yearning itself isn’t reducible to what we yearn for.

Yearning is the nature of Life itself; as thinking is to the mind, so yearning is to Life. It’s what Life does as its Life-ing. It’s the spark of desire and the pulse of praise.

Yearning is not the opposite of presence; indeed, embracing our yearning as the voice of life force fortifies and expands our capacity for presence.

When women come to me yearning for more, we start by learning to love our yearning.

I invite you to take a minute right now to pause, and drop into your body (I know you’re busy, but I promise this is worth it). Deep breath, long exhale. Move your focus from your forehead to your heart, belly, or womb.

Now, connect with the feeling of your yearning. You don’t have to yearn for something in particular—every one of us possesses (and is possessed by) the energy of yearning.

Now imagine that feeling as a current connecting you to the river of Life. Become aware of your yearning as pure sensation—maybe a swelling in your heart-space, a stirring in your womb-space, a gentle rolling deep in the belly, a surge in your genitals. Breathe, and notice the sensation, whatever it is. Notice any habitual responses to this sensation—any story, thoughts, or meaning-making. Any recoil or tightening.

Breathe again, and drop deeper into the sensation, saying this out loud: My yearning is love. My yearning connects me to the Field of Love. My yearning is Life loving me into living.

Allow yourself to be with this sensation of yearning without having to solve or sate it.

Just stay, here, for a few easy breaths.

Do you notice the shift? Where do you feel it in your body?

This shift can be the start of a whole new orientation towards your wish for something more. It can be the start of new way of being where yearning is your gateway to the most authentic, embodied expression you’ve ever known—right now. Not when you “get” what you yearn for, but here, now, as a woman alive to her hunger and unafraid of its call.

This shift—from lack to aliveness, from second-guessing to full expression—is our springboard at The Sex Retreat, my signature immersion held every year during the Spring Equinox at Onze Xphua Sanctuary in the lush jungle of the Riviera Maya.

At this retreat I guide you into a safe, powerful process that sparks this shift in your body.

Together, we reclaim sexual energy as life force and completely rewrite our relationship to yearning, desire, pleasure, and purpose.

If you’re a woman who yearns for more—especially a woman who questions your yearning, who fears your yearning, who bargains with your yearning, or who longs to satisfy and understand your yearning—this retreat is for you.

You will leave this retreat with a whole new relationship to your yearning, one that fuels your passion, clarifies your purpose, and deepens dramatically your connections with others

For the next two weeks, I’m offering Super Early Bird Savings on next year’s retreat: over $1500 in savings.

In addition, this special spring sale includes an interest-free payment plan of 9 monthly payments ranging from just $260 - $360/month.

Your investment (minus the $500 deposit) is completely refundable until January 1^st!

I want to make this easy for you. The Sex Retreat is truly a game-changer, and gets juicier, deeper, more mystical and transformative every year. This is a 5-day, 5-night luxury retreat in a breathtaking sanctuary. Every meal is prepared by our private chef with the freshest local ingredients and offered as art. We have the whole place to ourselves—the stunning tiered swimming pool, the underground cenote and its ancient crystalline waters, the open-air shalas and numerous groves of star palms and banana trees where you can melt into the chorus of birds.

This retreat is valued between 5K- 6K depending on room, which means you save between $1000 - $2000 during this sale!

Get all the details here.

If this has been calling, please don’t keep putting it off. “Later” usually becomes never. These savings expire in two weeks, as does the payment plan. Spots are limited to ensure an intimate and individualized experience.

Book a free call with me here. I’d love to connect with you—and your yearning.

Much Love,
Kirstin

But it’s Monday, and I haven’t even looked at the pages of notes I’ve amassed about this offering, let alone birthed it. Instead, I started an essay that I didn’t finish. I had a long talk about death with a woman in a cafe who lost her husband last month. I read a random, excellent article about Whitman in bed before getting up. I filled the wood box and stared at the blazing fire for what felt like hours.

I journaled for pages about the voice inside that tells me I’m doing it wrong, a voice that’s been more alive this week than ever, and how I’m feeling both the stridency of this voice and its origin in someone other than me, in a great-great-great grandmother perhaps.

Still, not a single bit of work on this major offering.

I wrote about the long slow-motion shuffle with grief that’s shaped my year.

I wrote about my dad. I texted back and forth with my daughter about Jesus, Gnosticism, and apostolic validation.

I took a long walk in the pouring rain.

When I heard, then saw the first loon of the year, I burst into tears. Since he died, I’ve felt my dad visit me with the loon. I sobbed and sobbed, whole-body sobs. I thought of his smell, his long fingers, how he turned to me from his bed and said “I’m going to miss you” before he stopped talking, a few days before he died.

I talked to my sister for two hours while walking home.

I rebuilt my fire. Hung my wet clothes up to dry. Sat by the wood stove in my underwear.

I set a jug of nettle tea to steep. Watched a young eagle chase an osprey that was holding fast to a fish in its talons.

As night falls, I accept that I’ve done none of the work that I came here to do.

Or so it seems.

What do you think?

Love you.

WATCH THE CEREMONY

This was my biggest take-away from the retreat this year: that softening our feminine bodies is truly the key to just about everything we desire—not only delicious, fulfilling sex, but our courage, confidence, authentic expression, inspiration, intimacy, self-love, pleasure, sacred purpose, vision, expansion, and empowerment. In short, our aliveness.

But softening begins with slowing down, and slowing down is challenging in a world that rewards us over and over for speeding up and doing more. Many of us are afraid to slow down—even (especially) if we “know better”: we’re afraid we’ll fall behind, afraid we'll lose what we’ve worked so hard to create, afraid we’ll miss out on our own arrival, on the very thing we’ve been working for/striving for/doing for….

And yet, here’s the thing: until we slow down enough to soften, our body never feels safe. And until the body feels safe, it stays closed: braced, alert, busy, tense, anxious, seeking, stimulated.

A closed body is a normalized body, a body we’re so used to inhabiting that its symptoms—low libido, lack of purpose, confusion, anxiety, fear, depression, diminished life force, or that chronic low-hum feeling that something’s missing (not to mention myriad auto-immune conditions)—are typically treated as problems to solve (and medicate) rather than wisdom calling us home.

Because here’s what I witnessed again and again at the retreat: when we slow down, we soften. When we soften, the body feels safe. When we feel safe, we naturally open. When we open, the truth within emerges of its own volition, without effort or force.

Which is, of course, why we tend to resist slowing down: while the truth sets us free, freedom isn't a function of truth, but of how we respond to its call.

Truth asks for authenticity. Authenticity urges expression. Expression means being seen, heard, known, felt. And visibility, for most women, is both the thing we crave and what we fear most.

And for good reason: we’re often taught to do our best but don’t stand out. To shine, but avoid the spotlight. So many of the women I work with—and I, myself—hit upper limits just as we touch our own genius. We taste the sweetness of our unfettered pleasure, then procrastinate and shrink. We speak a streak of brilliance, then cap it with a shaky laugh. We feel the power of our psychic gifts, but shuffle around them for fear of being judged.

Truth—the path of authentic desire and the pulse of pleasure itself—guides us into the heart of who we are and, by divine design, into loving encounter with who and what we’ve outgrown: our wounds, our survival strategies, our outdated thoughts, our stale careers, our loveless relations.

This is not some kind of karmic slap-down, but a call to love of the highest order: an invitation, as Meggan Watterson puts it so well, to love those parts of ourselves that have yet to feel love, and in so doing, to re-member our nature as inseparable from the Love that Never Leaves.

This is why your deepest desire is divinely guided. Why what you want wants you. Why pleasure is the gateway to sacred purpose. Why eros is innocent and sexuality is nourishment. And why your body is the portal to your truest expression, not a detour.

Because here’s the thing: the process of slowing down—the practice that actually summons the truth we’ve been seeking—is also what readies the body to hold and express the answers it unveils.

Let me say that again: slowing down, softening, opening, and allowing—the four-part practice of feminine embodiment—conditions the body to feel and to have, to attract and receive, to become and express our deepest yearnings and our truest desires.

When a woman embodies her truth she becomes the most magnetic and powerful force on this planet: abundance enfleshed, creation inspired, eros incarnate.

This is path to aliveness. To erotic embodiment. To being all-in.

And it’s simple—if not always easy: Slow down. Soften. Open. Allow.

Slow down.
Soften.
Open.
Allow.

In a later essay I’ll share spicy details of the retreat itself, including the powerful, mystical gift we received from the Great Mother on our very first night together. I’ll also be opening enrollment soon for next year’s Sex Retreat (March 16 - 21), along with extra early early bird pricing.

For now, I leave you with this offering:

You deserve to slow down, you get to soften, safety is possible. The clarity you crave lies curled within your body’s habitual grip. When you exhale fully, at the cellular level, you will unfurl. When you open, you know. Your knowing is nourishment. Your nourishment is pleasure. Your pleasure is foundation. Your womb-space is a wellspring of wisdom both ancient and unique. Your sex is good. Your sex is Source. Your sex is yours. Your wild is medicine. Your hunger is prophetic. Your longing is wise. Your power is inherent and your body a temple. Your expression, necessary. Your truth, a beacon. Your healing, an intervention. Your ecstasy, your home.

I love you.

xo,
Kirstin

P.S. While in Tulum the week before The Sex Retreat, I met a beautiful woman (I was staring at her and her partner, so they asked me if I’d like to join them for lunch, lol) who makes, among other things, amazing music. She goes by Prosperity Tsitra. Here’s one of her songs, “No Way to Be Late.” If what I’ve shared here resonates with you, this song will, too. Enjoy!

WATCH THE CEREMONY

Here’s the heart of it:

In a time when old systems and illusions are unraveling, the process of remembering is the ground from which true vision emerges: a way of being that bets on our humanity not as a flaw to overcome, but as a technology of Love that we’ve yet to fully claim.

If there’s an abiding message, a belief above all others that unifies and guides my work, it’s this—that far from the grim Hobbesian human whose instincts need curbing and checking by standardized schooling and punitive “justice,” we humans are wired for cooperation, emboldened by compassion, inspired by beauty, and motivated by care.

As scholars such as Rutger Bregman have shown, we didn’t (contrary to long-standing belief) evolve to the top of the food chain via brutish competition, but through cooperation and “friendliness.” Not only are we perfectly designed to perceive the breathtaking beauty of this world, but to be so moved by what we perceive that we’re seized by the irresistible urge to repeat it and share it—to paint, sing, dance, build, write, design, innovate or otherwise create in response to a love so visceral we can’t not express it through our makings.

This proliferative energy is the pulse of art and prayer, of ceremony and ritual, of mathematics and science, of poem and hymn, of healing and teaching, of relationship and reverence—of devotion. It’s the drive at the heart of human desire, a longing that, when followed, leads us home to the truth of who we are: fractals of God-Source, expressions of original longing.

Walt Whitman, the great poet-ecstatic, named this essential energy the “procreant urge”: ”urge, urge, urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world.” It’s what we in the West, after the Greeks, call Eros, the animating principle of Life itself. Every wisdom tradition in the world has a name for this force—Chi (China), Sekhem (Egypt), Prana (India), Ki (Japan), Mana (Polynesian), Ruach (Hebrew/Islam), to name just a few.

When we embody our Eros, rather than silo or suppress it, we quite literally become conduits of original longing, of divine expression. Which is to say, when we embody aliveness, we bring heaven to earth. We radiate warmth. We trust our pleasure. We know our purpose. We own our power. We are in service to others. We feel at once authentic and interconnected—self-realizedand somehow selfless—that deliciously paradoxical state of the ecstatic.

Ecstasy, from the Greek “ékstasis” (ἔκστασις)—to stand outside the habitual self—is not mere transcendence or detachment, but a surrender so complete to this body, this life, this moment, that what is most familiar reveals itself as sacred.

The ecstatic path is a journey of descent and return that asks us to be taken by what we fear and what we love, and to stay with ourselves as we are undone and remade by what we meet.

It’s the state of radical aliveness we experience when we trust our longing, honor sensation, and meet grief and beauty without turning away.

This state is our birthright. It’s our blueprint, our template, our calling. It’s what we’re here to realize, to remember. It’s what spiritual traditions and ancient mystery schools sought to understand and anchor on earth. It’s human being as potential actualized. And it’s what this moment of collective disillusion and awakening is calling forth with loving, no-bullshit force.

Because here’s the truth:

The crimes we commit against this earth and each other are not a symptom of being human, but of not being human enough.

This June, over the Summer Solstice, I’ll be returning to Greece to lead an intimate pilgrimage devoted to awakening the ecstatic in service of Life on this planet.

I believe passionately, and tenderly, in our capacity as humans to realize our potential on–and with–this Earth.

Greece first called me in 2018, when I took my kids there on our first big adventure post-divorce. The land undid me–the silky limestone dust that begged my body closer, the thousands of bee hives dotted like tiny temples through the hills, the perpetual golden hour of late summer on Mt. Parnassus, the cool throats of ancient caves moist with ceremonial breath, the ancient olive trees pulsing with wisdom more immanent than any temple … It’s a land ripe-to-bursting with memory, mysticism, and Eros.

Greece alchemizes grief and sorrow as the honeybee turns pollen to honey. To embrace this ancient land and to let it ravish you in turn is to be stripped of egoic illusion and know yourself–and the world–anew: clear, whole, radiant, alive, awestruck by the miracle of this sacred Life.

This will be my third pilgrimage to Greece in four years. We’ll celebrate with local musicians and dancers, be guided by people I know and love, treated to special adventures off the beaten path, and welcomed warmly as friends. This pilgrimage is deeply shaped by relationship–to people, and to place–and abiding reverence for this land.

If you’d like to explore The Path of Eros & Ecstasy: A Pilgrimage to Greece, June 19 - 27th (with optional extension in Cyprus), let’s chat. You can book a call with me here.

Much love,
Kirstin

THE PATH OF EROS & ECSTASY

We are living in extraordinary times, when the darkness that’s been here all along, in our systems, in our social structures and institutions—and, oof, in our own habits and unhealed projections—is revealing itself with insistence.

I firmly believe there’s a purpose to this revelation—indeed, a loving intelligence moving through it—beyond the cultivation of fear and despair and, ultimately, distraction that strategic exposure intends (i.e., partial release of the Epstein files and outing celebrities such as Deepak Chopra while protecting many others).

As shroud after shroud falls around the globe and we’re faced with greed so monstrous and unapologetic as to seem fantastical (itself a key strategy of sleight-of-hand), the call is loud and clear:

Remember the Love that you are. Remember yourself as an expression of Source yearning to know itself through you. Remember that you are Divinity embodied. Remember that this remembering is the opposite of hubris or arrogance—it is the condition of embodied presence, attentive availability, nourishing intimacy, grounded compassion, loving courage, lived purpose, sacred contribution, and grace.

Evil, in contrast, is forgetting gone wild. Evil is what happens when one is so disconnected from Source that one must feed on the energy of others to survive. It’s the ultimate addiction, the root of narcissism, and the fuel of exploitation. Evil can only survive in a paradigm of duality and its attendant constructs (race, class, social and political hierarchies) because it needs an Other upon which to project its hollow core.

When we make a practice of remembering who we really are—through healing, embodiment, breath, grounding, pleasure, prayer, nature, creativity, service, love, and devotion—we don’t resist evil; we collapse it.

And let me be clear: to track the divine intelligence threading itself through this collective rebirth is not bypassing. It’s not an invitation to ignore the horror that this process unveils and entails. It’s not a palliative, or a reason to isolate and turn away from grief, pain, injustice, suffering, or our own rage. It’s not an excuse for avoiding the unsexy stuff of making calls and donations, exposing lies, boycotting and protesting, and going out of our way to help others.

To attune oneself to the divine design at work in this moment is to source the fortitude we need to stand our ground and pull heaven to earth. It’s essential to building capacity—the ability to hold multiple and seemingly contrasting states and emotions at once: grief and wonder, anger and love, fear and courage, sadness and joy, pain and pleasure.

Without capacity, we deploy rigidity in the name of peace. We shut down and shut out in the name of truth. We live sanitized lives shorn of passion and soul in the name of success. We abuse our bodies and earth in the name of ease. We confuse accusation for agency and feed the very distortion we think we’re resisting.

This moment is calling us out and calling for more. We’re in the midst of a profound awakening—a radical remaking of not just our governing bodies and social structures, but our consciousness.

Do you feel it? The deep-belly hum of something stirring, a lifting-from-within, a frequency of possibility? A sense, however amorphous and vague (or pointed and clear) that it’s not just more-of-the-same-but-better that’s calling, but a new vantage point altogether, a quantum re-seeing?

Awakening often begins with a restlessness that’s hard to name: an agitation in the body that feels both energizing and tiring. Swings between insight and confusion. This is the nervous system calibrating to an emergent state, when what’s familiar is crumbling and what’s coming is still finding shape.

In the midst of fear and suffering and what looks a lot like chaos, it might feel like a form of betrayal or numbing to plumb our own internal system for the subtle knowing that even (especially) this madness is a summons from—and to—Love.

But nothing could be farther from the truth: when we make this knowing our compass, we’re choosing the path of courage over comfort, one illuminated by vision. It’s a path of devotion, and trust—not only in the Mystery, but—and this is key—in the fulfilled version of our own becoming that the Divine already sees.

We are so much more than we think we are.

Gone are the days when “evolution” and “revolution” pass as isolated options. This threshold requires a r/evolution of remembering that will burn the house down as it births a re-Union within and without.

To remember who we are.
To remember the awe in aliveness itself.
To remember the miracle of embodiment, and the audacious ache of an animate world that longs for us to feel it.
To remember beauty.
To remember reverence.
To remember reciprocity.
To remember sovereignty.
To remember ecology.

To remember who we truly are, and why we’re here.

Like all initiations, this journey of remembrance is one of descent and return that asks us to be taken by what we fear and what we love, and to stay with ourselves as we’re undone and remade by what we meet.

In a time when old systems and illusions are unraveling, this remembering is the ground from which true vision emerges: a way of being that bets on our humanity not as a flaw to overcome but as a technology of Love that we’ve yet to fully claim.

This June, I’m hosting a pilgrimage to Greece devoted entirely to this journey of remembrance and the ecstatic path it awakens.

The Path of Eros & Ecstasy is a retreat unlike any I’ve offered before.

Limited to 8, this intimate immersion is for those who feel the call, sacred and wild, to reclaim our humanity as the extraordinary expression of Life it’s meant to be.

During our 8-day pilgrimage from Athens to Delphi to Crete (with an optional VIP extension in Cyprus), we’ll work deeply with the mythic intelligence encoded in the original temple—the animate land itself. Greece’s caves, seas, streams, temples, stones and trees will initiate us through felt, embodied encounter.

Guided by Demeter and Persephone and the archetypal story of descent and return, we’ll explore the full depth and breadth of the human experience, building our capacity to receive, generate, and emanate aliveness.

This aliveness, what we often describe as “radiance” or the “light within,” is the natural expression of embodied remembrance, of conscious (and erotic) re-union with the truth of who we are—and is the truest antidote to evil.

This light is both our human birthright and our sacred calling, and its luminosity is proportional to our willingness to be with death and loss, in darkness and uncertainty, and emerge through grief’s portal wiser, open-hearted, and more intimate with Life.

To embody and emanate aliveness is to walk the ecstatic path—a practice of surrender so complete to this body, this life, this moment, that what is most familiar reveals itself as sacred.

If something in you stirs as you read these words, I invite you to schedule a call with me here to explore whether this pilgrimage is a fit for you.

If it aligns, I’d love for you to join me in Greece this June over the summer solstice for a life-changing journey where we’ll amplify eros and anchor the ecstatic in service of Life on this planet.

In the meantime, I want to thank you. Thank you for reading my writing, for sharing it, for the comments and personal notes that let me know I’ve touched something in you, and for the thoughtful responses that move me and widen my perspective.

I appreciate you deeply and am grateful you’re here.

Much love,
Kirstin

THE SEX RETREAT

In a world rife with suffering and violence, in a time that will forever be marked as not only a pivotal moment in this country’s (USA) reckoning, but in our reckoning with our humanity, with the earth—with Life itself—we must question and push against silence; others’, and our own.

But silence isn’t always a symptom of indifference, or avoidance, or complicity.

As Marianne Moore, one of my favorite modernist poets, put it, “the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”

With regard to this threshold moment, I’d omit (another of Moore’s favorite words, as in “omissions are not accidents”) her always, inviting consideration that—as she writes in a different poem—there’s a form of quiet, of gathering, of weighing, of being-with that is not about having “no feeling,” but about having “so much.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Epstein files’ partial release, I found myself reaching for Moore’s words. Even though I wasn’t surprised by what’s revealed in the emails (they confirmed, rather than shattered, what I’ve known to be true), I nonetheless felt nearly immobilized by a wave of molasses-like-emotion so subterranean and visceral that words couldn’t find it.

My limbs felt heavy with grief. Having experienced sexual abuse myself as a small child, I felt that familiar feeling of floating-above and trapped-inside. Unmoored and frozen. Repelled and drawn in.

I know that many of us have felt, and are feeling, this strange cocktail of sensations, or an iteration of it. Even if we’re not shocked. Even if we know.

It’s not a place where words come easily. Indeed, sometimes “speaking out” from this place is less about healing and justice and more about discharging and numbing: a form of buffering or bypassing rather than tending our pain.

Core to my own healing, and the healing I facilitate with others, is the process of Being-With what hurts, of softening into (when the time is right) the very resistance that at one point we pulled over our wounds in order to be okay. This tender process of turning towards the very thing we thought would devour us is an act of immense courage and the anchor of true self-love. It fosters unshakable inner presence and the ability to hold myriad feelings at once—grief, love, sorrow, joy, anger, awe. It’s the anchor of inner safety, and therefore self-sovereignty—the very thing we are being called, collectively, to claim.

The process of Being-With is one of embodied reclamation. It’s an act of returning to and trusting the wisdom of the body—no small thing when one’s body has been preyed upon, played with against one’s wishes, and blamed rather than protected.

It's a process that asks us to be with feeling as sensation, to consciously and deliberately drop beneath story—the language of the mind—to the felt-sense that often exceeds or foils our efforts to contain (or control) it with words. Trauma is stored in the soma, the flesh-and-bone-and-blood, and the energies in and around it.

Being-with ourselves in this way is an act of radical reclamation. Of justice. Of protest. Of love. It says: My body matters. My body is home. My body is mine.

To reclaim our bodies as sovereign is to not only alchemize our pain into power, but to heal lineages; generations upon generations of women (and some men) who were tortured, imprisoned, or killed because they insisted on the body’s knowing as medicine, wisdom, and oracle. To honor and keep this history close in the work of our outcry and advocacy is crucial, for it reminds us that the abuse of women’s and girls’ bodies—of any body—began as an effort to control and exploit the very generativity and creative power that will midwife our new world.

Indeed, sometimes silence is not indifference, but a symptom of feeling—of holding—so much.

I believe in the necessity of speaking truth to deception. I believe in confrontation. I believe in using our voices. I believe in writing, singing, summoning, protesting, chanting, strategizing, processing, declaring. In song, poem, dream, outcry, lament, and invocation. Of communicating and encouraging and pledges of solidarity.

I love language, and don’t take it for granted.

But I also believe in the power, and necessity, of silence in times of upheaval and pain, not as escape or avoidance, but as what it often sounds like when we’re doing the work of reclaiming what’s been taken.

I urge us all to remember that such silence is not the same as “collapse,” that not posting in protest—and not going to protests—is not always indifference.

As Adrienne Rich wrote in her long poem, “Cartographies of Silence,” this kind of silence has a “history” a “form. / Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence.”

This silence—the silence that’s essential to stillness, to Being-With, to radical presence, and therefore to self-love, self-responsibility, and loving others well—is a crucial component of our individual and collective becoming in these times, especially when what’s at stake is precisely the embodied sovereignty whose violation leaves us—rightly—outraged.

I love you. I hear you. I see you.

ONE SPOT LEFT

Here we are, on the last day of the first month of 2026. The Year of the Snake, in Chinese cosmology, is coming to an end, and we enter the Year of the Fire Horse on February 17th. The Spring Equinox, Nature’s New Year, arrives on March 20th. And tomorrow, February 1st, welcomes both the full Snow Moon and Imbolic, the Gaelic festival marking the first light of spring.

Our calendars, our ways of mapping and ordering the felt experience of time … the names we give to seasonal cycles, moons, planets and stars … all are tethered to the earth’s rhythms, and speak to our human need for ritualized beginnings and ends—and therefore ritualized growth, or expansion.

I love this remembrance: it gently insists that our traditions of release, intention-setting, letting-go and letting-in are ancient practices by which we not only honor and enact reciprocity with the land and the cosmos, but affirm intentionality as inherent to human flourishing.

Our deeply human need to pause, to take stock of where we’ve been, to commit on purpose to where we’re going, and to surrender along the way to a force both felt and elusive is not only core to who we are, but a need so vital to our thriving that we nurture and protect it with elaborate ceremony and celebration.

I remind us of this today to not only encourage you to be proactive about what it is you want to think, believe, experience and create in the year ahead, but to offer assurance in the face of that other equally-human trait that rears its head in these times: negativity bias, the ingrained habit of seeing the worst (in ourselves, in others, in situations), a vestigial trait we developed over millions of years to keep us safe while living in the middle of the food chain.

At this time of year, negativity bias shows up in the way we often try to motivate ourselves into new and healthier habits and commitments by focusing on our flaws, as if doing so will keep us “accountable.” This approach is so ubiquitous as to seem normal, its methods seemingly harmless: the setting of new goals in order to prove ourselves worthy, to compensate for and correct a sense of ourselves as not-quite-enough, as lacking, as not enough or too much.

This strategy for enacting change is driven by discomfort—we’re so sick of feeling bad that we resolve to do things differently. But here’s the rub: as a culture, we pathologize pain. Which means that the pain that urges our desire to change begets shame. We then mistake shame for the fuel we need to overcome the habits that hurt.

Shame shuts us down: it’s about not-good-enough, I’m-broken, something-is-really-wrong-with-me. These thoughts, so normalized as to feel true, whittle away at confidence. They arrest creativity, foil ingenuity, and foster delusion in the name of clarity, leaving us “stuck” and “confused” and more primed than ever for the next class or guru or practice promising us the way out.

Shame—that thing we’ve been taught to weaponize so as not to “let ourselves off the hook”—is like the undercover spy that undermines the operation from inside out while appearing to be our greatest ally.

This is how we find ourselves forever hungry—in the insatiable sense, not the sacred sense: never fulfilled, addicted to the promises of “personal development.” Too often, we seek growth not as a path to deeper presence with ourselves and each other—including discomfort and what it wants us to know—but as avoidance.

In this way, our healthy, vital need to grow on purpose is rerouted by a well-intended but misguided practice that begets, to our dismay, yet another cycle of good intention confirming defeat: we resolve that this time we’ll get healthy, eat better, exercise, leave our unfulfilling relationship, start meditating, make more money, stop overdrinking/eating/etc.; we’ll buy this or that program or planner or both to catapult us into commitment; we’ll ride the high of new action for about three weeks; then, almost inexplicably, we’ll slide back to where we were before, with the added weight of disappointing ourselves yet again.

Eventually, this cycle—one we see, but despite best efforts can’t seem to break—causes too much pain, so we stop dreaming of change. Low-burn depression sets in. Anxiety hums through our veins.

But there’s another way.

Real change, sustainable growth, is less about becoming someone new and more about becoming who we truly are. It’s less about arriving and more about self-acceptance. And it’s anchored at the level of thought, not action: looking clear-eyed at the thoughts we’re choosing to think about ourselves and others. If we’re thinking unkind and critical thoughts about ourselves, we will constantly sabotage the very confidence, creativity, and energy that catalyzes courage and compassionate, daring action.

So, if you’ve been unwittingly or even purposefully shaming yourself into Doing Better this coming year (you’ll know if you have been because you made some version of these commitments last year, and the year before that...), I invite you to simply stop.

Instead, take some time to remind yourself of all the good you summoned in yourself this year to contend with extraordinary challenges: what limits did you come up against and then overcome, because you had to? What inner resources did you call upon that you didn’t even know you had? What skills did you learn and refine as you transformed the impossible into the doable after all? When did you love and show compassion for others, for yourself? What did you create, invent, or discover to help you and your loved ones as you made your way through disorientation? What sorrows did you embrace, grief did you embody, tears did you shed, love did you make, laughter did you share, and spread?

Remember: your wish to improve your life, to do better, is less a sign of failure than an affirmation of your aliveness, of being attuned to the energy of life itself—what the poet Walt Whitman called “the procreant urge“—expressing itself through you.

My hope and wish for us all in these times of radical change and transformation is that we’ll call on this knowing and root our amazing, indefatigable human longing for growth—which is really a wish to come home—in the fertile space of becoming-on-purpose that connects us all.

Much love,
Kirstin

TWO SPOTS LEFT!

We all want to be happy. Of course.

But when happiness becomes the goal, we become less happy.

When happiness is the destination, what feels like the opposite–inevitable human emotions such as grief, anger, sadness, sorrow, not-knowing, and fear–appear to us as impediments, emotions we need to fix rather than fully feel.

When we approach an emotion, regardless of what it is, with “fixing” energy, we enter a state of resistance. To fix presumes something is broken. To feel broken summons shame. The body contracts, even subtly, at even the faintest hint of shame.

When we contract (when we resist sensation), we restrict the energetic flow of life-force in our bodies, our erotic current; we push against the ostensible source of our discomfort, and in so doing we push away exactly what we need to midwife us through the labor of our own becoming– the most potent medicine we have–our aliveness.

Beneath the quest for happiness is a deeper, more primal, more authentic longing to feel fully alive. To feel awake. To feel connected with Life.

But aliveness is more than a feeling. It’s a whole-bodied state of being, a sacred remembrance of Life’s relational web and our miraculous place within it. Both grounding and inspiring, aliveness bridges our human sense of separation and our divine knowing of the wholeness we’re here to reclaim.

When we feel alive, we’re illuminated from within, emboldened to share our gifts and talents and to lead as an act of devotion rather than ego.

Yet when we make happiness our destination, instead of the truer yearning to feel alive–what our pain-averse, consumer culture conditions us to do–we keep pulling the rug out from under our own feet. We feel worse and worse as we seek to feel better. Defeat and disappointment accumulate, and soon, we’ve lost our way: our big hungers, deepest desires, and innate love of learning are hard to find beneath the weight of a self-defeat we feel but can’t quite name.

As we step fully into this Year of the Fire Horse, I invite us to collectively shift our goal from happiness or even joy to full-spectrum aliveness, and see what happens—

What finally falls away?
What breathes again?
What quickens?

What happens to your energy?

I’d love to know!

If you’d like to learn more about aliveness and how you can cultivate it, check out my recent interview on The Somatic Pleasure Podcast with James Humecky. Here’s a little preview:

And if you’d like to experience a deep-dive, in-person training in the art of aliveness, check out my Sex Retreat in the Riviera Maya, Mexico, over the Spring Equinox. This 5-day all-inclusive luxury retreat is for women of all ages and partnership statuses who want to embody their eros, reclaim their power, and claim their sacred purpose.

We’ve got just TWO spots left. This retreat is a once-in-a-lifetime game-changer.

Much love,
Kirstin

TWO SPOTS LEFT

“Too much.”

In the moment, it hurt like hell—six weeks before my dad died.

But even this, it turns out, was a gift.

All of it was.

Not no pain, no gain, the so-called “gift” of tough love.

But the gift of Life inviting me, imploring me gently—yes, gently—to lift my face to its face, to meet its gaze with my own, to be seen like never before, to be known.

Because the last thing I wanted to do was leave.

Today, one week into 2026 and three days after my birthday, I’m in awe of the intimacy I feel with Life itself.

I see—I know—now that Life is truly a force, desiring, conspiring, responding, playing with us through every inhale, every heartbeat, every whisper, every insight.

I’ve always known that our world is alive—the stones, trees, waters, stars—but I used to conceive of this aliveness as one might think of gas in a car: what fuels form into function. I experienced life as both a condition and result of aliveness, and therefore my life as, well, just that: my life, something “I” contain, my ration to “do” as I will with.

But this year summoned all of me in a way that turned “life” inside out: curled up next to my father as he lay dying, holding his hand, feeling his pulse soften, then fade, then slip into stillness. Watching my pup die, his sunken body hardly different in death than in life at the end. Singing and dancing with a community bound by decades of love at my father’s funeral, my son and ex-husband leading the way on banjo and guitar. Missing my father’s smell, how he’d exhale and sigh with each hug. Burying my little dog beneath the ancient apple tree, placing our love notes in his grave.

Death comes to us all, and to all those we love. But it comes to each of us differently. I recognize that my experiences of death this year, as heart-wrenching as they were, were soft. They weren’t brutal. They weren’t violent. Nor were they surprising.

And surely, this made it easier for me sit with death, and to see, in doing so, that our fear of endings so often hold us back from living as fully as we can.

What this year showed me is that the “fully” is what matters: it’s what we’re here for; it’s the grand invitation, the beautiful game, the sacred heart of it all.

It’s in the FULLY—as in fully present, fully available, fully aware, fully feeling, fully engaged, fully alive—that Life meets us with a love so consuming that nothing—not even death—can make us second-guess why we’re here.

It’s in the FULLY that intimacy blooms and Life becomes not merely fuel but lover, partner, co-creator, guide and muse. And I don’t mean this metaphorically: literally, this is what Life aches for us to know—

That the great love we want, that arrival we pursue, the success we strive for, the purpose and meaning we crave—it’s all in service of aliveness itself, of sacred union with Life.

If this speaks to you, if your body rises in response to these words, then I invite you to question the premium we habitually place on regulation and clarity, and consider the compass of Eros instead.

Wild times are here, and we need every ounce of imagination, innovation, creativity, magic, courage, compassion, and unapologetic, outlandish love we can muster.

These times call for capacity, not contentment.

For courage over clarity.
For intensity over regulation.
For expansion over safety.
For making unleashed love to Mystery instead of future-fondling ourselves into compliance.

Of course, living erotically—because that’s what living FULLY is—does forge a deeply resourced (safe, grounded, guided) inner world; capacity grows in proportion to presence, and presence is the art (at the heart of) aliveness.

When regulation is the goal rather than feeling fully alive, we can inadvertently (or intentionally) confuse growth with stasis, reinforcing the status quo (both within and without) in the name of “peace.”

But peace is never about merely protecting the norm or defaulting to what’s known. It’s about a system so attuned and alive—be it a body, a business, a collective, or a movement—that it can metabolize intensity, hold paradox, and respond to change not by bracing or rejecting, but by letting Life take it even more fully.

So here’s to a year of authenticity and aliveness, to intimacy and abandon, and a world willing to let Life love us back.

Happy 2026, and thank you for being here.

Much love,
Kirstin

EARLY BIRD PRICING ENDS 1/21

January 6th is my birthday, and it’s also the day of Epiphany, according to Christian tradition, when the three wise men, guided by the Star of Bethlehem, visited Jesus, revealing to the gentiles the physical manifestation of God, of the divine incarnate. In pre-Christian times, January itself was sacred to Janus, god of doorways, thresholds, and transitions, aligned with “revelation” and “crossing over.”

The word epiphany is derived from the Greek word ἐπιφάνεια, or epipháneia, meaning “manifestation” or “appearance.” In classical Greek it was used to describe the appearance of dawn, an enemy in war, and especially the manifestation of a deity to a worshiper.

In contemporary secular usage, an epiphany is defined as “a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event), usually simple and striking; or an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure of a revealing scene or moment.”

I’ve always loved the coincidence of my birthday and the day of Epiphany, for what greater gift is there than a sudden encounter with the divine? An infusion of absolute clarity that is itself an assurance of inviolable belonging, of not only glimpsing a vital truth but embodying that truth?

When we experience the click of sudden insight we feel, as the cliched cartoon image suggests, the brain as “lightbulb,” as a source of illumination that cuts through confusion, snaps us awake, and—importantly—connects us to an energetic current of life that I’ve come to know as Eros: that life-force, that love-source, that swells our bodies with its urge to be made manifest, made tangible; that lifts our hands into building, that drives our minds to compose and compute and choreograph; that kicks our feet into dancing, unfurls us in loving, and pulls us into and through the rudderless abyss of what is not yet known (ocean depths, outer space, another’s heart) in search of that outer edge where the vast other becomes familiar (the curious eyes of the octopi, water on Mars, his vulnerability) and we are reminded afresh of our essential in-tactness, our rightness in the world, not by curling in and away but by questing through and beyond, transmuting in the spark of connection what seems, from afar, to mark a severing, a kind of cosmic Do Not Enter.

Epiphany is, more than anything, an experience of radical belonging. In its midst, we see that confusion is a symptom of over-steeping in the known, a failure of curiosity. We discover that true freedom—that sudden sensation of clear-seeing—is achieved not through isolation, not by stepping-away and seeing anew, but by climbing into the palm of what beckons from beyond and finding we’ve always lived there.

All my life I’ve lived in devotion to this sensation of sudden-seeing, at times achingly so: when I was a little girl, I used to stand with my head thrown back as far as I could, looking up at the ceiling. I’d scan the little slopes and nooks, wanting so hard to flip the house upside down so that I could make of these details small slides and cozy forts, a playground out of a world at once omnipresent and inaccessible.

As a teenager and young adult this hunger for re-seeing became at times nearly unbearable as I realized that my experience of the world is always mediated by my perspective of it, and that perspective is necessarily subjective. I was sometimes possessed by an almost obsessive wish to leap out of my own brain and body into that of another: what would it feel like to see the world through his eyes? To feel the sensation of living through her body? At times, I felt trapped, cut off from the full feast of what it is to be alive by the very vehicle of my own existence: I recall vividly the acute agitation I’d feel in the most extreme of these times, how my arms seemed to ripple with millions of tiny bug-like beings scurrying beneath my skin, desperate for air, a way out.

Maybe you’re wondering about my sanity, and maybe I do have the capacity, even desire, to ride the sometimes dangerous edge of what’s known, what can be known, what ought to be known, risking pain in the pursuit of what Whitman once called “mad contact” with life. But I don’t know how to otherwise exist, and I’m not sure I want to, because the reward of epiphany-seeking is, so far as I know as I enter my 58th year, an ever-deepening capacity for mining the fullness of life—for feeling a sometimes uncontainable joy just by running my fingers through morning-wet grass; for being swallowed by grief so unrelenting that I’ve no choice but to be cleansed by my tears; for discovering new reaches of ecstasy and pleasure by way of my body’s keen knowing; for choosing to love where I used to default to resentment and blame; for learning to see what I’ve learned to avoid.

I am, of course, still a student in all of these ways, but what I now know for sure—and didn’t used to—is that there is always, as long as we’re conscious, possibility ahead, even in the depths of our bleakest times. No matter our age, our circumstance, our struggles, we possess an innate need to know what we don’t, and to re-see what we do. This is the ultimate gift of Eros.

This desire, this primal curiosity, is, I believe, our saving grace as a species; what will, if intentionally tapped and nurtured, guide us into greater empathies, unlikely allegiances, transformative healing, true forgiveness, and ethical innovation.

Tapping this curiosity, feeding it, celebrating and honing it—this is my life’s work, what lifts me up in delight and sometimes leaves me balled-up in tears. So, thank you; thank you for making this work possible by reading and sharing my writing, coming to my retreats, entrusting me as your coach, being my students, and teaching me how to live more fully by striving to do so yourself.

With much love, and wishes for a year of spangled-seeing and true belonging,
Kirstin

P.S. In celebration of my birthday, I’m excited to announce and share my brand-new website, a labor of much love, designed and built by my amazing daughter, Ella Bryant Zona, and her team at Zona Creative Solutions. You can check it out here!

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As we slow-turn between the ending of one year and the advent of the next, savoring the sacred pause between them, I’ve been thinking, as I often do at threshold moments, of birth. We’re in an extraordinary moment as humans, experiencing a mass collapse of systems and the paradigms that support them, as well as the rise of a humanity at once ancient and reborn.

Birth–physical, literal, mammalian birth–has a lot to teach us in these times. With this in mind, I’d like to draw your attention to a beloved documentary from 2018, These Are My Hours, directed by Scott Kirschenbaum. This film bears witness to a woman (Emily Graham) giving birth at home. There are so many things I love about this film, but one of them is the way in which it reveals birth as a dance between surrender and intention, opening and closing, making way and making happen.

Emily, a third-time mother, trusts herself. Absorbed by the work of riding each contraction, she radiates palpable self-possession. Her husband and mother (nearby, alert) give her space just as they move swiftly to her side when she asks for help or comfort. Between contractions, Emily opens her eyes, her face heartbreakingly open, on the verge of tears, and wonders aloud if she can do it. A few minutes later, she pulls inward, jaw flexed, eyes closed, and seems to grow in stature just as she hunkers down, every ounce of energy spun and tethered to a single point of focus: meeting the pain, embracing its urgency, breathing through it—opening.

As she labors, Emily moves seamlessly between these states of vulnerability and courage. She shows us what the process of birth, that most ubiquitous of creative processes (we’ve all been born), has to teach us: not only are vulnerability and courage interdependent, but they are, in their interdependence, the actual condition of creation, of life itself.

Moreover, the pain of labor is not some price we must pay for the privilege of creating. Contractions aren’t what happen in the aftermath of each incremental opening; they are what open us. When we resist the pain, we close. When we’re able to lean into it, to meet it as pure sensation, to trust it rather than pathologize it, we open. We make way for the miraculous.

Which is why (I believe), Emily soothes herself with these words: These are my hours, she says at the peak of her labor. Let them be hard.

These words moved me so much when I first heard them that I want to repeat them for you...

These are my hours. Let them be hard.

You don’t have to be a mother, or a even a woman, to intuit the truth this movie lays bare: the creative process—of birthing our dreams, our loves, our hopes, our visions, our transformations, our soul’s deepest yearnings for expression, a new human collective—demands constant interplay between states of being we too often think of as distinct, even at odds: softness and fierceness, joy and sorrow, grief and belonging, clarity and uncertainty, fear and faith, lostness and confidence, failure and success, pain and pleasure.

Life’s exuberance does not manifest despite the dark, but through it. When we mistake the natural, generative pain of creation as an indication of something gone wrong, we unwittingly overlook the very encounter that will open us fully, that will bring us face-to-face with what it is we need to know, to feel, to gather, to husband in order to make way for the creation that seeks expression through us: our own astonishing capacity for feeling, for ever-more presence to the breadth of our aliveness.

2025 was, for me and for many others, a time of intense transition. It was a time of both pulling in and reaching out. I was at once more vulnerable and raw this year than I’ve been in a long time, and also braver. I spent hours crying, letting the tears wash through me, the pain at times so intense it nearly took my breath away. I asked for help when I needed it, and I took time to tune into myself, to pause, to lean in.

These were my hours, and they were hard.

And they were necessary. Life-giving. They opened me to a quality of strength and self-presence that has anchored me in deep-boned belonging: in connecting so fully with myself—with the panoply of sensations and fears and desires that delineate my perspective, and with the silence and vastness that cradles and contrasts it—I connected easefully, playfully, authentically with the earth, my children, my family, my friends and my mission.

This year has been a true labor of loving. My labor didn’t begin this year, and nor has it ended, but as with any birth, creation is borne of seasons—and right now, as we step into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, I’m full-fed with what I’ve learned, what I’ve discovered, and a passion to share it with you.

To that end, I want to tell you about several offerings I’ve created and what’s to come in the months ahead. I’m especially excited about The Sex Retreat, my all-inclusive signature women’s retreat in the Riviera Maya over the Spring Equinox where we center the reclamation and embodiment of Eros in service of healing, authenticity, and unabashed devotion to our sacred contributions.

The Sex Retreat
March 17 - 22, 2026
Onze Xphua Sanctuary
Riviera Maya, Mexico
Schedule a free discovery call to explore if this retreat is for you

Into the Mystic: A Sacred Pilgrimage to Greece
June 19 - June 28, 2026
Intimate group, application only
Schedule a free discovery call to learn more

1:1 Coaching & Mentorship
At the heart of our deepest desires and our wildest dreams is the yearning to feel alive. Beneath our sharpest regrets and darkest despair lies the fear that we never will.
Schedule a free Breakthrough Session here.

Modern Mystic Training
Coming in 2026!
Application only
Join the waitlist here.

As always, I love hearing from you. What are you gestating, or birthing right now? I’d love to know. I reply personally to every comment.

Love,
Kirstin

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Tomorrow, in the Northern hemisphere, we will experience the shortest day of the year and the longest night. In many parts of the world we are experiencing bitter cold: a call to curl in, hunker down, and seek warmth.

As mammals, we instinctively face the cold dark by simultaneously conserving and sharing. By turning inside and reaching out. Like foxes and bears and squirrels, we stay put in nature’s darkest hour. We move inward. We shelter. We become quiet. We burrow into memory and reflection: prayer, the lighting of candles, rituals of silence and observation. And we also gather. Like penguins, who press themselves into a circle of contiguous heartbeats to counter the arctic night, we too draw our bodies nearer to others’ at this time of year: congregations of singing and sermon, feasts with family and friends, long snuggles under blankets and bedclothes.

Born of and sustained by the earth and its cosmos, we can’t help but feel, if only unconsciously, closer to our own dark patches when the world from which we’re made is cold and dark: our grief, our sorrows. Our regrets. Our wounds and aches.

And yet, it’s also when we sink into our own darkest hours, our most vulnerable places, that we instinctually seek warmth and light: connection, comfort, and communion.

This pirouette from dark to light, from what hurts to what heals, is, I believe, the condition of gratitude: a deeply human, perhaps deeply animal, confrontation of our own fragility and mortality coupled with the recognition of our potential for tenderness, healing, and love. At the darkest hour, when the clamor of life-making quiets and we’re face to face with our vulnerability, we’re especially attuned to that which brings us feelings of comfort, safety and hope: a heartfelt hug, a close friend’s sympathetic ear, laughter (our own or others’), a shared meal with people we enjoy, an expression of understanding, a song we love, a poem that moves us, a beloved’s empathy, nature’s embrace.

Gifts of love like these are what feed us in the leanness of winter, strengthening our capacity to not only reach out, but to receive. As such, this dance between asking and accepting, gifting and receiving, is crucial to the maintenance of sentient life, big and small.

We might think, then, of gratitude in and of itself as an essential survival skill, a practice we’ve evolved to see us through the darkest, coldest seasons of our lives.

Giving doesn’t just feel good, it keeps us alive. It threads us together through the eye of our common needs. It helps us thrive by waking our capacity to see and be seen.

This holiday season, I invite you to practice the magic of giving in all that you do, but especially in less conventional, less commercial ways.

Let giving remind you of the darkness each of us inhabits, that vulnerable place that leans into and summons the light.

Let giving guide you into forgiveness, the condition of joy.

Let it open you up to your own true heart, that part of you that loves to love, that is love, whose love dissolves the illusion of the lone, unwelcome self.

One way to put this intention into practice is to give a handwritten letter to someone you love in lieu of a present you purchase. This could be a letter of gratitude. You might begin by telling this person what you like most about them, using as much detail as you can to craft a picture of how you see them in the world: the way he speaks to you and others. The work she does in the world and how much you admire her. The way he plays and laughs. The things she makes and creates. You might then focus your attention on the things this person does for, and with you. How his whole face lights up when he smiles. How she’s always willing to listen, without judgment, even when you feel like a mess. You might conclude by sharing a way in which this person has inspired you. What you’ve learned from her. How he’s helped you to become more of who you want to be.

You might illustrate or decorate or embellish your letter.

You might put your letter in a box, wrap it, and set it under the tree.

You might slide it into a stocking.

You might slip it beneath your child’s pillow.

Or you might give it to yourself.

I’d love to hear about your letter, and how writing it—and giving it—helped you spread the magic of giving this year.

*

Finally, I offer you a little poem I wrote in praise of the dark, of what I find there.

Gifts of the Dark

The seam beneath my boots where hard-packed sand gives way to mud,
the shifting edge of sea now just an outstretched arm away.

The moon, her snow-blue, milky incandescence.

Roots of trees, their deep, undaunted reach.

The cave’s cold throat, where ancient knucklebones of lambs were thrown by oracles and unsung priests.

The bat, the owl, the black-socked trickster fox.

My deepest fears, my wildest grief, and deeper still, the fears and dreams I carry in my bones from those who came before me.

And oh, the bones—the bones of those I’ve buried, the sun-bleached skulls and mandibles of critters folded back to earth, the living bones inside my flesh.

The womb. The fertile void where all life starts.

Desire, ecstatic and untamed.

The vast abyss where longing lives.

The ocean’s secrets, sunken ships.

My heart, laid bare and glistening with grief.

The whole of Life curled up inside one tiny, perfect seed.

*

Happy holidays!

Love—and with gratitude,

Kirstin

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I’m convinced that a good deal of what we call seasonal affective disorder isn’t a response to the growing dark, but a symptom of our resistance (individual, collective) to it.

How do we pause, surrender, exhale, quiet, when so much of what we encounter asks the opposite of us?

The paradigm of productivity tethers worth to doing, knowing, and seeing—Pushing through, holding more, willing our way forward.

But nature’s paradigm is seasonal, cyclical. Nature knows that the fallow is where fertility quickens. That all Life emerges from the dark.

As we approach the darkest day of the year and the beginning of 2026, I invite us all to remember what our bodies already know: descending into the dark is not a turning away but a turning toward.

In last week’s essay I wrote about the fertile void: the place where, as Fritz Perls put it, meaning-making ceases and being begins. The void is fertile precisely because of its potentiality: when we surrender to the dark, literally and metaphorically—to not-knowing, to uncertainty, to the liminal space between ending and beginning where what we’ve known can no longer point the way; to grief, to letting go, to endings—we become available: to the weave of the unseen that seeks to know itself through us. To the Divine. To the cosmic whole. To the sacred geometry of Life itself. To the imaginal realm that’s so much vaster than our own. To Mystery.

This availability is not passive, but receptive. Paradoxically, when we’re stuck in a season of doing, we can only create so much: iterations of sameness in the name of innovation. Certainty confines us to what we already understand, and in that narrowing, we leave no room for the emergence that is Eros’s native language.

But when we remember ourselves as expressions of nature rather than separate from it, we root back into the seasonal rhythms that have held humans for millennia—rhythms that offer a deeper, steadier sense of security than any plan or projection ever could.

Ritual and ceremony are the practices that tether us here: a way of being held by something larger while we root into the dark, meet endings with reverence, and let the fertile void return us to wholeness.

This is why I’m hosting a free Winter Solstice Ceremony called Eros in the Fertile Void: A Ceremony for Meeting the Dark, Honoring Endings, and Awakening Aliveness.

This free ceremony offers an alternative (or compliment) to year-end practices that prioritize goal-setting, planning, and visualizing of the year ahead. During this ceremony you’ll be guided to rest into the mystery, where not-knowing isn’t a problem, but a prerequisite for devotion.

In this Winter Solstice ceremony, we’ll honor the deep, generative darkness that holds the seeds of all becoming. Together, we’ll explore the unseen, the uncertain, and the unformed as the sacred terrain of Eros—the animating force of all Life—and the source of our creative and spiritual powers.

Grief belongs here, too, not as a detour, but as one of life’s most faithful teachers. We’ll make space for grief as initiation, as an unexpected entré to the ecstatic wherein the mundane becomes miraculous, not because we’ve left ourselves behind but because we’ve learned to stay—as grief insists we must—so intimately with what is.

Through guided ritual, seasonal ceremony, and embodied inquiry, we’ll invoke the solstice as a threshold moment: a descent into the womb of night where transformation begins. We’ll honor what has ended, feel into what is opening, and remember that the ecstatic and the ordinary are not at odds.

In the heart of the dark, within the fertile void itself, we discover the miraculous pulse of Eros—and are returned to an aliveness shaped by the very darkness we’ve dared to inhabit.

I hope you’ll join me. You can find all the details and register here.

Love,
Kirstin

Ceremony Details
Thursday, December 18
7 PM – 9 PM EST
Live on Zoom
Replay available
Free • Registration required

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I love this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere—the darkening, the rising hush, the low-slung winter light made luminous by night’s unhurried caress.

Too, I love the advent of endings—not merely because they promise new life, but because I’ve come to cherish the emptiness that endings give way to.

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, called this liminal space the “fertile void.” Drawing on ancient wisdom traditions and philosophies such as Taoism, Perls explains the fertile void as a “state where meaning-making ceases and being begins.” As the name suggests, this state is—as all threshold moments are—a paradox: emptiness is full of potential. All Life begins in the dark. It’s in the midst of contraction that her cervix opens. Or, as T.S. Eliot put it so beautifully in The Four Quartets, “the still point of the turning world… there the dance is.”

In previous Decembers I’ve written, held ceremony, and hosted retreats in honor of “the sacred pause,” but this year was one of great loss and surrender, a long process of stripping away and letting go that handed me over and over again the gift of my own presence. And inside of that gift—of being-with death, that ending that feels so final, and the cavernous ache of my grief—I’ve found an aliveness unlike any I’ve known. Not in the instant cascade of light that all of us felt as my father’s release, nor in the absence of his suffering, but—as I’ve started to reach again for the life I’d set aside—in a wilder, more intimate life I’ve discovered in its place.

It’s as if my vigil with endings, unbeknownst to me at the time, was quietly tending an inner unfolding that needed to root in the dark, away from the glare of my gaze. A stance where not-knowing isn’t a detour, but a prerequisite for devotion. To the path of Mystery. To the miraculous. To the sacred geometry we glimpse through our senses but that, like the dream that recedes when we try to describe it, softly foils our attempts.

I understand now what people mean when they say that grief “carves us out,” that it leaves us with an absence we carry forever. But I’ve also come to see that it’s exactly this absence that summons the presence that prepares us to perceive a reality so vast and unimaginable that it’s simply off-screen when we’re dancing in the flow of what we know, even when we’re doing so with gratitude and reverence. The sweetness of grief—another paradox, indeed—is that we can’t hold, we can’t embody, the vastness of Life until we’re taken by the endings that bring us to our knees.

The most surprising gift of grief, for me, has been its entré to the ecstatic: a contact with Life so intimate that we experience the mundane as miraculous, not because we’re in an altered state but because the slow initiation of being-with that grief mentors us through eventually leaves us more alive, more available to what’s right here.

This heightened experience of feeling and perceiving—of being—is not born of pausing, wherein we step out of, then back to, a life that stays largely unchanged, but, as Franz Perls observed, from confronting the void when life as we’ve known it ends: we lose a loved one, a relationship, a religion, a future we’d planned for. We leave a career, a home, a way of being stitched into our bones. We may have chosen this ending or been blindsided by it; either way, we’re at the edge of an abyss. Old habits have no footing here. Disorientation replaces direction. What brought us comfort, or safety, or meaning, is gone. Identity feels hollow. Time feels both quantum and glacial, a tangle of dimensions. We feel lost, unmoored. There’s no going back, but nor do we see a forward.

There’s only now—infinite, immediate, unbearable, exquisite.

The challenge is staying.

Softening, breathing, being-with.
Sensation, not story.
Feeling, not fixing.
Leaning in, not away.
Surrender, not solving.

It’s easy to mistake the void—within, or without—as lifeless, but the void is where the infinite dances, where fertility quickens, and where we meet our own undying, even our rapture.

As we approach the end of the year, and in the glow of the huge supermoon, let’s not turn too soon from the dark. Let’s hold each other here.

Soon enough, the light will return, and through new eyes it will blaze.

Love,
Kirstin

If you’d like to be guided through an evening of ceremony and teaching in honor of the fertile void, please join me for a special online workshop on December 18th, from 7- 9 pm EST. It’s free, but registration is required. You can sign up here.

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It can envelop me in tenderness and quicken my senses.

It can pare everything down to the elemental and clarify what truly matters to me–and what doesn’t.

Most (or best) of all, grief wants to show us that our deepest pain is not a punishment, but a portal: no matter the memory, no matter the depth of ache, no matter whether my tears are slow to build and slow to release, or whether they gush in a flash, like a sudden storm–no matter how grief calls, it never fails to guide me home to the love that begets it.

So, this week, as the holidays are upon us, I’d like to share some thoughts about love, and my journey, that I wrote a few years ago in the wake of a different season of grief, that feel even more fitting today. I hope you’ll find some comfort or inspiration in these words.

Grief teaches me that love is a feeling we generate by loving. That said, being loved is its own essential pleasure, and sometimes, in those late-night hours after a long day, when we’re finally in bed, and all is quiet, and the dark envelops us like a fathomless mirror, being loved—held, seen, known—by another can feel like the lost key to the life we long for.

For years after my divorce (and years during my marriage) I felt this nearly unbearable ache. By day, my life was full-to-brimming; I was creating and growing and caring for and providing, and this richness of doing filled me up. But by night, curled up in my bed, my heart would ache, and I longed for a man—“the man”—that I knew better than to make my answer, my comfort, my medicine, my arrival, my exhale, but nonetheless did.

Despite my knowing, I still sought love’s gifts of peace and comfort from another.

After a couple of relationships post-divorce, I was alone for the first time in my adult life. At first, the late-night ache in my chest felt like it might consume me. I would cry myself to sleep.

But rather than recoiling from this pain, I surrendered to it. I decided to tend it like I would the pain of any beloved: gently, attentively, holding space, offering love.

I shifted my focus, slowly, from my fantasy balm of a man beside me to my felt experience in the moment; my body. I dropped out of the story I was attaching to my ache (all the things I was making my aloneness mean), and focused instead on feeling the ache as pure sensation: heaviness radiating from my solar plexus, a dark pool spreading to my limbs. When the stories rose, I quieted them kindly but firmly and went back to feeling: noticing, locating the sensations, breathing into them, watching them transform.

By day, I found myself paying more attention to simple pleasures. I didn’t have to force it: doing so came naturally, as an extension of my practice of feeling what hurt. My morning tea. The sky at daybreak. My dog’s soft fur. My daughter’s knowing, gentle hands. My son’s twinkling eyes. And as I noticed more pleasures, I made—without effort, without force—more of them. I bought a frother for my morning tea. I made time to take my dog on walks in the woods and by the lake instead of around the block. I became even more present with my kids, feeling the exquisite depth of my love for them, as well as the bittersweet dawning of their adulthoods.

I found myself taking lavish care of my body: massaging my own feet with coconut oil at night, buying beautiful new sex toys, learning new recipes, taking long walks in every kind of weather, buying a standing desk to help with work, resting when I needed it, sprinting and sweating hard when I needed that.

One day, as I was talking to a friend, I realized that I hadn’t felt that old nighttime ache in a long time. That night, I noticed how peaceful I felt in my bed. My sheets—I bought myself new sheets, too—felt deliciously soft. My dog, a gift of endless love. My body, an instrument of orchestral aliveness. My mind, limitless. I was alone, but I was content. Did I still long for partnership, companionship, sex with another? To be loved in that way? Yes. But that longing felt playful, a choice; not a crushing need.

Through this gateway of grief I learned that love is always available to me, in every single moment. That I am the one who generates the feeling of love in my body and soul, through the act of loving. I discovered an endless number of things to love, every day—including my own pain.

I learned that love is nothing more, or less, than the act of radical presence: noticing, allowing, sensing, feeling.

As humans, we are geared for delight. We are wired for astonishment. Our senses seek the sensation of their affirmation, their existence: this is rapture. Engaging them is the act of loving. An act of love.

We can start right now, wherever we are. Our bodies want it, our spirits need it. Without apology, without agenda, as an act of devotion and a ritual of communion.

May your grief set you free. May your love guide you home.

Love,
Kirstin

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I put everything I owned, other than a suitcase of clothes and a few tubs of essentials for my retreats, in storage.

Miraculously, my best friend, who lives in the town where I grew up, near my parents, needed a house sitter.

Meanwhile, I took all of the profit from the sale of my house and bought the tiny cabin that my ex-husband built for us and our new little family 20 years ago on the coast of Downeast Maine. He now owns the undeveloped stretch of forest on the other side of the dirt road. We’ve pledged to never sell either property; this is soul-land, sanctuary. For our kids one day, and their kids, and hopefully, theirs…

Some people thought this was a bad idea—investing it all in a tiny seasonal place with no running water, in a rural, largely poor coastal town a million miles from anything—this isn’t the quaint fancy coast you see in magazines—an investment that, moreover, I’ll never see a financial return on.

I also put a lot of my business on the back burner this year, while putting my dad and mom on the front. I made less than 50% of the revenue that I have in recent years.

Some people think I’m nuts when I tell them I use an outhouse. That I haul water from a neighbor’s hose (though I just got a well!). That I live in a 24 x 16 cabin with no amenities. That I use a laundromat.

Slowly but surely, I’m making this my home… Splitting my time between here and staying with my mom in her recent widowhood, in the house I grew up in four hours south.

And as I do—as I surrender to the call of this land, a call in my bones that feels bigger than Life itself—a lot of what I thought I needed is falling away.

And even though I’m single, even though I made less money this year than I have in over a decade, even though I pee in the woods whether it’s sunny or snowing or raining, even though I cry bucketloads every day for my dad, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

The more I let go of, the more room there seems to be for Life to swell through me. Sometimes, I’m almost breathless.

I feel so lucky.

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There is, however, a difference between embracing the mournful emotions in service of growth, and indulging them.

This crucial but sometimes subtle distinction is the springboard for John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” an all-time favorite poem of mine that I mentioned in my last post.

Here’s the opening stanza:

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

Don’t, urges the speaker, seek escape (or even solace) from melancholy through drugs, drink, melodrama, or (fantasies of) death, not because these are morally reprehensible choices, but simply because they rob us of the chance to feel our “wakeful anguish.” By checking out, numbing, reacting, and distracting, we walk through our days half-asleep, immune to not only our pain but also the rapture and quickening of sensual, felt aliveness—what Keats refers to later in the poem as “Beauty,” “Joy,” and “aching Pleasure.”

As Keats so beautifully reminds us, melancholy is native to joy (“Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine”), but not because there’s some universal law that taxes us with a measure of pain for every dollar of pleasure we spend: as Keats’s imagery suggests, the mournful emotions are inherent in, not a complement to the emotions of ecstasy and delight.

This distinction—between “inherent in” and “complement to”—is key to cultivating a life that feels fully-lived, a deliberate way of thinking and being that fosters active engagement, expansive happiness, and genuine purpose. And yet, this difference is often misappropriated in service of the very beliefs we need to overcome.

How often do we say, for instance, “no pain, no gain,” while thinking, however dimly (that is, automatically), something like “yeah, that’s just how it works. Nothing’s free. You gotta pay your dues.”

Right?

Wrong. This is thinking born of the belief that there’s only so much good to go around—love, money, happiness, health—and that, moreover, one’s chances at having enough are proportional to one’s suffering, and—and, by extension—the suffering of others. I could write a whole essay on how this way of thinking, one I struggle at times to even notice in myself, let alone undo, underwrites a slew of modern injustices (from our failing penal system to animal agriculture), but I’ll save that for another day and say, instead, this:

I love Keats because he worked tirelessly to understand, with exquisite precision, the relationship between pain and pleasure, and in doing so helps us to do the same: melancholy is at the heart of joy because joy, in it’s attachment to embodied (of-the-senses) pleasure—beauty, bliss, passion, communion—is “fleeting.” We are thrilled by the sight of a shooting star not so much because what we see is especially dazzling (though it can be), but because, in large part, the chance of aligning our upward glance with that split-second streak is strikingly rare.

To experience joy means confronting loss—the sudden cessation of that which, mere moments ago, brought us rapture. If we aren’t willing to encounter loss, to feel grief and sorrow, we don’t just sever ourselves from pain, we inure ourselves to delight.

This is why, in the second stanza of “Ode on Melancholy,” Keats instructs us to cope with the mournful emotions by feasting upon the most fleeting of pleasures:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Not just a rose, but one whose bloom is over by noon; not just a rainbow, but one flung into being by the break of an ocean wave; not just a lover’s gaze, but the passion pulsing behind her rage. And it’s no mere snacking on these particular pleasures, but a full-out feasting—glutting, feeding—that’s called for.

Keats invites us to make of our melancholy an occasion to experience joy more fully, not (and this is key) because joy is a distraction from the mournful emotions, or some kind of karmic compensation for our sorrows, but because when inhabiting what appear to be the extremes of human emotion, we close the illusory gap between them.

By embracing melancholy, rather than avoiding (indulging) it, we sensitize ourselves to the full range of human feeling, and in doing so become far more aware of the parity between emotional states we too often think of as not only distinct, but at odds.

Why does this matter? Because Keats was on to something that can, literally, save our lives by staunching the commodification of scarcity thinking: what if we understood the experience of loss and sorrow as a doorway to heightened feeling, and therefore, ecstasy?

What if we didn’t think of acute grief as at odds with the thrill of possibility?

If we can understand the mournful emotions, in all their aching and sometimes baffling intensity, as inherent, not anathema to happiness and pleasure, we will go a long way towards short-circuiting the symptoms of self-doubt and second-guessing that tip us from embracing our “wakeful anguish” into indulging our fearful wish to stay small and safe.

Allowing myself to experience my grief and to mourn my loss is important because it frees me to create new routines and rituals, it reminds me of what I value so I can create what I want next. When gripped by the mournful emotions, we ought in fact, Keats suggests, “glut” and “feed” our sorrow by realizing that to fully experience joy and beauty is to consume it, to witness and experience its full range.

For me, this means allowing the surges of grief over my father’s departure from this earth to wash through me, to buckle me, to bring me to me knees. It means pausing when I see a photo of him, or a drawing he made, or when I walk by his favorite sitting spot by the sea, and leaning into, not away from, the ache in my body. It means noticing my tendency at times to pull back, to allow only so much sweet sorrowful pain as I reach for my phone or some other distraction—and stopping, breathing, and allowing myself to sink into the open arms of my sorrow and the baffling, wrenching, breathtaking reality that I will not feel him, smell him, hear him, be with him in physical form in the life again.

It’s meant mourning the loss of my beloved soulmate, my sweet pup Django, earlier this year, and taking the time to place fresh-fallen apples and wildflowers on his grave.

It’s meant missing the prairie, the huge open sky, the heartland stippled with corn stalks shorn in anticipation of winter’s low light.

Years ago, it meant feeling the agonizing sadness in the wake of my divorce; facing my grief over the loss of living as a family, a feeling that is not at odds with, but augments, my appreciation for my family today as-it-is.

It means embracing melancholy when it comes, feasting on it, taking it in, being ravished by it.

So that I may sit with my father and feel his last breath. So that I may be gifted by the exquisite gift of being present to his death. So that I may honor his body, and feel the softness of release. So that I may sing at his funeral with everything I’ve got, arm in arm with my kids as their dad plays a song in his honor. So that I may remember the weave of life that shapes me and humbles me. So that I may rejoice.

Love,
Kirstin

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