I want to take a minute to say thank you to everyone who has reached out, checked on me, sent love, offered support, or just quietly held me from a distance. I haven’t had the capacity to respond to every message in the way I normally would, so please bear with me. I’m reading them. I’m feeling them. And they matter more than you probably know. Yesterday I went shoe shopping with a girlfriend and could not find one pair that felt good on my feet. Such a small thing, but suddenly it was just too much. She looked at me and said, “It’s going to be okay. It’s just shoes.” And I needed that. Not because the shoes were the problem, but because sometimes something tiny is where all the overwhelm finally shows itself. Holding space for other people as they’ve moved through hard things has been such an honor in my life, and I think knowing what that has meant for me has made it easier to let other people hold space for me now. I don’t have to explain every detail or keep going back into the whole story in order to feel what I’m feeling. Sometimes I can name what is here, stay with the emotion, and let it move without feeding it with every detail of what happened. Sometimes I still get pulled back into the story because the urge is strong and the feelings are real. But I can notice it now. I can come back. I can let someone sit beside me without needing them to fix it or make it make sense. And to those of you who have told me that my work has gotten you through some really challenging moments, I keep thinking about that too. You’re right. It is powerful work, and right now I am so incredibly grateful that I have it. In so many ways, the life I’ve been living has felt like a fairytale. Not because it was perfect, but because it was a life I once could hardly have imagined for myself. Love, adventure, home, community, travel, possibility. A life we created together that felt really special to me. And now that story has taken a very hard turn. Was it real? Yes. Was it beautiful? Yes. Am I grateful for it? Absolutely.

I want to say something about my absence here lately. Please don’t take my quiet or lack of participation as me stepping away from this work. The truth is, I’m living it. In a way I never would have chosen and in a way that has asked me to use almost everything I’ve created. Emotional Surfing was never meant to be something I taught from a distance. It came from my own life, my own mess, my own learning how to stay with what I feel without letting it take over the whole story. And right now, thank God I have this work. It has been a lifesaver for me. Not because it has made any of this easy. It hasn’t. But it has helped me recognize when I’m feeding a feeling instead of feeling it. It has helped me notice when I’m looping. It has helped me make space for grief, anger, disgust, fear, love, and even possibility without asking any one of them to decide what happens next. I’m finding my way through something deeply personal and life changing, and for now, that means I have less to give outwardly. But I haven’t left the work. I’m in it.

I’ve done a lot of work around emotions. I’ve built an entire framework around learning how to experience them without getting completely swept away by the story around them. And yet here I am, looping over this drainage mess. Going back through the same documents. The same questions. Looking for the thing I might have missed. Trying to figure out what they might argue next. Trying to get certainty out of something that, right now, doesn’t have any. And I can see myself doing it. That might be the difference. I’m not pretending I’ve somehow evolved beyond looping. Apparently not. 😂 But I am getting better at recognizing when my mind has stopped helping me solve something and has started trying to make me feel safer by thinking about it harder. The drainage problem is real. There are still things that need to happen. There are still answers I want. And today, there may also be nothing more for me to do with it. That part is hard for me. Sometimes emotional surfing looks a whole lot less like peacefully riding a wave and a whole lot more like realizing I’ve paddled around the same damn buoy twenty times. What’s something you know you’re looping on right now, even though there may not be anything more to do with it today?

I keep thinking about how many of us know a lot about emotions and still don’t really know what to do when one hits. We can understand the pattern. We can explain why we react the way we do. We can read the books, listen to the podcasts, have the insight. And then something happens. Someone says the wrong thing. We feel rejected. Scared. Angry. Hurt. Overwhelmed. Suddenly all that understanding is nowhere to be found. That gap is what Emotional Surfing: Riding the Waves of Emotion is about. Not getting rid of emotions. Not becoming calmer, nicer, more positive, or less affected. It’s about learning how to be with what is actually happening before the story takes over. What am I sensing in my body? What emotion is here? What might it be telling me? What do I usually do when this emotion shows up? Do I run, shut down, prove, push away, hold on, disappear? And is there enough space here for one different move? That’s the work. Because emotion is not the problem. The wave is the wave. What changes everything is learning how I ride it. I built Emotional Surfing: Riding the Waves of Emotion because I needed something I could actually use in real life. Not just something that made sense while I was reading it. It’s interactive. It’s experiential. It’s meant to be moved through, not just consumed. And honestly, the part I love most is that it isn’t asking anyone to become someone else. It’s helping us notice what is already happening inside us with enough clarity to have a little more choice. The beta is still open for a bit longer while life has me on a detour and I finish some coursework. If you’ve been curious about it, this is probably the window. Because I don’t think most of us need more information about emotions. I think we need a way to meet them when they actually arrive.

To know what self love is versus to know in your body what it feels like