At the request of disgruntled neighbors, apartment residents globally are being asked to refrain from smoking on their balconies.12 Yes, the personal balconies whose otherwise useless square footage we pay rent for.

What follows is my response to the collective body corporate, which is that this request makes no sense and our neighbors should, respectfully, get fucked.

“What do you expect me to do—smoke inside?”

Let's think this through together.

You know as well as I do that smoking inside is going to destroy the interior of my condo, and my landlord's not going to like that.

But breathing my smoke into the open air? That produces no financial loss. It preserves the resale value of indoor spaces while distributing my secondhand smoke across an infinite sky.

Do you think the perfect purity of your lungs is more valuable than my rental agreement?

A tar-stained wall cannot clean itself. Your lungs can. Naturally. They filter foreign substances all day long, and I doubt you’ve ever even noticed.

But no—my cigarette is the bridge too far. Why should your body have to do what it was designed to do?

“No, you go inside.”

Also, if you don’t smoke yourself, what the hell are you even doing on your balcony?

What are you—standing there? Having a little think? Taking in the view? The view of what? The building across the road? The air conditioning units? Riveting stuff.

Nah, I bet you’re barely even on your balcony.

I bet you step out there once a week to water a plant. And whatever else you’re doing could be done just as easily somewhere else—like inside, where you belong.

Seriously—I’m pretty sure balconies exist to be smoked on. When was the last time you saw someone step onto a balcony not to smoke?

And let’s face it: Smoking is cool.

You probably see me out there, all melancholy and mysterious, and want what I have. But you’re too health-conscious, so you complain instead.

You should just admit you’re jealous and go inside.

“No, I don’t want to smoke on the street.”

Society asks us to indulge our vices in private, and I think that’s great because I don’t want other people killing my buzz.

When I have a cigarette, I want to savor it in the privacy of my own space, away from other people. That’s why I bring cigarettes to parties—so I have an excuse to leave.

But now you’re forcing me to subject myself to the judgment of strangers when I’m trying to relax? Great. That’s nice. Next you’ll have me taking a bath in a sewer.

If I'm smoking in 2026, my life obviously isn’t perfect. But I see—you’d like me to take this private negotiation with my mortality and conduct it on the sidewalk.

To kill myself for an audience.

That’s just mean.

Besides, you’re using the air to breathe. I’m using it to disperse my exhaust. Why do you get to use the air your way, but I don’t get to use it mine?

You think you have a monopoly over the sky or something?

The wind is free, asshole.

“Leave me alone.”

Look, I get it. Secondhand smoke isn't ideal. Neither is the sound of your wind chimes at 6am, but you don't see me writing letters to the body corporate.

We're all just trying to survive with our coping mechanisms intact.

I’m not asking you to take up smoking. I’m just asking you to let me enjoy the one small freedom I have left in this increasingly regulated world—the right to stand on my own tiny patio and slowly poison myself in peace.

Don’t ruin this for me.

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Anyway. If you liked this, subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more righteous indignation about things that shouldn't require righteous indignation. I'll be on my balcony if you need me.

“Why is this happening to me?”

That’s what I found myself asking—snotted-up in front of the TV on some random Tuesday.

Despite centering on two gay male characters, the whirlwind success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry is now running loose through the broader female population like an emotional contagion.

Straight women everywhere are clutching their chests watching two hockey players circle each other like emotionally constipated wolves, and I suspect most of them couldn’t name a single NHL team.

So what’s the deal?

One answer is the “warm hug” interpretation.

The show is a masterclass in emotional repair. Vulnerability gets met with acceptance instead of punishment—whether that’s Ilya letting his walls down or Shane letting the world in.

For anyone whose nervous system has learned that openness equals danger, watching these moments land safely is like finally exhaling after holding your breath, and that’s valid.

But I think there’s something else going on that speaks directly to the unnamed longings of modern women. I think it has to do with a word we almost never use when describing heterosexual romance.

The Word Is “Respect”

Beneath all the antagonism—the “fuck yous,” the elaborate performances of hatred—Shane and Ilya respect and admire each other. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be rivals; they’d just be two guys who happen to play the same sport.

This makes their relationship about two equals sharpening each other, and their competition on the ice runs parallel to the growth they inspire in each other personally.

Each one becomes the other's blueprint for the parts of themselves they haven't yet built, and our tears offer evidence: This is the relationship model we're starving for because we've collectively outgrown the alternative.

When was the last time you heard a man describe his attraction to a woman using the word “admiration”? We get “she’s beautiful.” We get “she’s sweet” or “supportive” or, if we’re lucky, “smart.”

But admiration implies something different. It implies looking at someone and thinking: I want to be more like that. You have something I’m trying to develop in myself.

As Shane and Ilya grow closer, they steadily become more like each other—something Scott Hunter subtly-not-subtly points out. And in doing so, they become more whole in the process.

Shane starts as a self-contained, high-anxiety guy marinating in internalized shame. As the series progresses, he integrates Ilya’s mindset by taking more risks and letting go of control, culminating in his coming out to his parents.

Ilya goes from suppressing his emotions to being someone who, like Shane, is honest about his feelings, lets down his walls, and learns that he deserves love.

It’s imitation as the sincerest form of wanting to devour someone whole—and some potent self-development to boot.

The Comparability Problem

I think what women are responding to—perhaps without fully realizing—is the total absence of the comparability problem.

When Shane demonstrates strength, skill, ambition, or emotional intelligence, Ilya doesn’t experience it as a threat to his own identity. There’s no unconscious calculation happening where Shane’s success equals his diminishment.

Sure, he grumbles at Shane’s golden boy status.

But there’s no quiet resentment building because Shane’s supposed to be the soft one, and no ego requiring protection from his competence.

The whole plot is about two people who are allowed to be equally formidable. Which means Ilya’s response is not to drag Shane down but rather commit himself to becoming better.

As two men, this comparability is inevitable.

They’re both working with the same cultural scripts and frameworks for what masculine excellence looks like. They push each other and sometimes want to kill each other—but then they get over it and fuck.

Then, they get so far over it that they fall in love.

The female population’s response? “Oh. So it is possible.”

Stagnancy Isn’t an Option

Here’s the math: You need a partner who challenges you in a positive direction. This isn’t optional. Growth is as fundamental a human need as food and shelter.1 And if your relationship doesn’t have it, you’re not at peace—you’re on borrowed time.

Usually, one person gets too “comfortable” and the other starts to grow. The grower disrupts the status quo, and the comfortable one resents the disruption. You can probably map this onto every couple you know.

In the past, this wasn’t really a problem because women’s growth trajectories were nonexistent. We kept the house tidy while the men in our lives evolved or stagnated in whatever direction they pleased.

But now? Women’s growth trajectories are front and center.

We've done the therapy. Read the books. Cultivated ambition, opinions, emotional intelligence, professional skills, and psychological depth. We've developed ourselves in directions our grandmothers couldn't have imagined.

And then we've discovered—often painfully—that this development creates friction. Because we're still working against centuries of programming that says one person in a relationship should be the impressive one.

And it shouldn't be you.

The result is a kind of slow-motion collision. Growth generates comparison. Comparison generates discomfort. Discomfort generates resentment. Resentment generates distance.

Many women have already clocked this. Many men are still holding the old script, unable to see the alternative—the one this show is drawing in neon.

Because Shane and Ilya don’t have this problem. They’re rivals. Comparison is the whole point. And somehow, they’ve metabolized it into something that looks a lot like mutual worship.

But what does this mutual uplift look like in practice?

Rivalry as the Blueprint for Real Love

Shane and Ilya's rivalry isn't just a plot device. It's a framework for what transformative partnership actually looks like: productive friction. It’s two people triggering the shit out of each other until something finally breaks open.

In life, we transform because we keep slamming into the same painful wall until we either break through it or accept a diminished existence, and something keeps calling Shane and Ilya to choose the wall—again and again.

Pair this with a truth embedded in a lot of women's fantasy lives: We like the idea of transforming someone through love. It's Beauty and the Beast. It's every "I can fix him" joke that's only sort of a joke.

But the reality is that women must consistently walk away from these dynamics out of self-preservation because the wall never breaks.

Yet, between Shane and Ilya, we see a different outcome—right at the moment where Ilya breaks down in the hotel room.

Years of defended, controlled, emotionally armored existence give way, and Shane just sits in his lap and holds him through it.

The wall finally breaks, making women everywhere, again, say: "Oh. So it is possible."

Shane’s love transforms Ilya from someone who maintains rigid control over his emotional life, to someone who can weep in another person’s arms and believe he deserves to be held.

But crucially, Shane transforms too. He comes out to his parents. He lets go of control. He expands.

It’s not one person saving another. It’s two people using each other as mirrors, accelerating through their respective blocks, and becoming more whole in the process. It’s a version of transformation through love that is balanced, mutual, and actually works.

I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that this is what’s brewing at the edge of the collective consciousness.

And it’s what modern women desperately want.

What Rivalry Actually Means

A rivalry is just teamwork in disguise.

A true rival isn’t an enemy. A rival is someone who makes you better by refusing to let you coast. They challenge you, expose your weaknesses, and force adaptation.

And if you’re both doing it, you’re both improving—locked in a dance of mutual elevation that looks like combat but functions like collaboration.

This is what many women want from partnership, I think.

Not stagnancy. Not comfort at the expense of growth. Not someone who needs us to stay the same so they can feel secure.

We want someone who can handle our full expression—including the parts that might be stronger than their equivalents—without it threatening the relationship. Someone who can be triggered by us and choose transformation instead of resentment. Someone who sees our development as an invitation rather than an insult.

The gender dynamics of the past make this difficult.

Men, broadly speaking, haven't been encouraged toward the same kind of growth work women have undertaken. And it's hard to have a rivalry when one person isn't playing.

But Shane and Ilya are both playing. They’re both developing and being transformed.

And maybe that’s the real fantasy. Not just love, but productive love. Partnership that moves. Friction that generates growth instead of erosion.

Two people making each other better, one trigger at a time, until they end up in a cottage somewhere—finally able to hold each other through the breaking.

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Thanks for reading. If you've ever ugly-cried over fictional characters who have better relationships than you, welcome home. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more on growth, relationships, and the quiet grief of wanting more than we've been told to expect.

Beauty is universally valued. You can tell because nobody checks their reflection in the morning and hopes to have become uglier overnight.

But I believe investing our efforts into beauty tends to have diminishing returns.

Taking reasonable steps to avoid terrified looks from passersby on the street makes good social sense. But beyond this, it would serve many of us to reduce the time, energy, and resources we spend preening and artificially enhancing ourselves.

Because these investments aren’t everybody’s homework.

At best, trying to become more beautiful may be redundant with other strategies as a tool for getting what you want out of life.

At worst, chasing aesthetic beauty may actually hurt these efforts by dampening the magnetism you could achieve via forms of self-mastery that are more aligned with the cards life has dealt you.

And ultimately, when we ponder our life’s wishlist, most of us don’t even want to be beautiful. We want one deeper, more useful trait—one which seems like beauty on the surface but is different.

Read on to learn what that trait is and discover how to embody it.

The Cosmetic Arms Race

Recently, I’ve fallen headfirst into a hyperfixation with strength training.

When I’m not heave-hoing dumbbells around, I’m living vicariously through videos of others doing it while I gnaw away at protein on the couch.

Through this viewing, I’ve learned that many everyday guys are “throwing gear” (that’s steroid speak) despite wide-ranging health risks, which include heart attacks and malfunctioning genitalia.1

Why do they do it?

Some do it because they feel they’re falling behind in the battle for admiration and attention, and steroids seem like an efficient way to turn their luck around.2

This sounded to me like the male version of lip filler. Which brings us to beauty as typically sought by women through botox, plastic surgery, and weight-loss drugs.

So, we have these artificial means for attaining the universally valued ends of masculine and feminine beauty.

What’s interesting is that we seem more obsessed with juicing up in order to level up on this trait of beauty than we are relative to other universally valued traits—like intelligence, creativity, and good humor.

This isn’t to say there aren’t performance-enhancing drug economies for these domains too. Trust me—nicotine, psychedelics, and a few beers can help with all of the above.

But we fear the outcomes of ugliness and flabbiness far more than we fear being dumb, uninspired, or unfunny, pointing to a cultural overvaluing of aesthetic beauty compared to other values.

Clearly, we’re biased to give more focus to things we can physically see and touch, and such visually observable phenomena are easier to market to us on billboards.

But I think there’s another reason for this imbalanced focus that’s insanely easy to resolve—simply by discovering that beauty isn’t what you really want.

What you really want is to be attractive—which is not the same as being beautiful.

You’re Training the Wrong Stat

Too many of us conflate beauty with attractiveness.

Increasing your beauty requires that you enhance your aesthetics. Increasing your attractiveness means embodying more of what others value, and beauty is just one thing that others value.

It’s specifically one of 24 things people value—if we’re to take psychology’s leading taxonomy of values to be true.3 This taxonomy includes not only beauty, but traits ranging from creativity and learning ability to humor and zest.

So already, we can see that if you’re aiming to be balanced in your attractiveness, trying to be a bombshell shouldn’t take up more than about 4% of your energy and resources.

But this is still an oversimplification that fails to account for how each person’s path to self-betterment will vary according to their unique DNA-driven blueprint.

In other words, attractiveness arises through mastering a personalized balance of these 24 values—not just by indiscriminately hammering at the beauty stat.

Mastery Is the Real Magnet

Mastery is relevant to everybody’s life path because it’s through mastery that we touch something larger than ourselves. But the specifics of that path will differ greatly for each of us.

For a minority of us, physical beauty is our path to mastery. It’s an arena where we can develop—not as vanity, but as spiritual vocation.

For others, that path runs through wisdom, kindness, or any number of domains that don’t photograph as well.

Your domain for self-mastery may change at different stages of your life. You can think of this like maxing out your interest in one branch of a skill tree, which leads you to switch your focus to another.

But when you conflate beauty with attractiveness, you confuse a journey with a destination. You fail to recognize that it’s the journey to self-mastery in the domain of beauty—not beauty itself—that grants you sustainable attractiveness.

What do I mean by “sustainable attractiveness?”

When you think of the word “attractive,” you should think about it not only as being about drawing in others’ attention, but also about drawing in the things you want.

It’s about abundance. Being a magnet, basically.

And oftentimes, this means drawing in people who can grant you access to the things you want—material things, knowledge, experiences—all because we’re biased to help and give opportunities to more attractive people.45

The term “sustainable attractiveness” speaks to whether you can actually hold onto the things you magnetize into your life through your attractiveness without infinitely struggling or inevitably losing them.

Energetically speaking, this is about building a vessel or container strong enough to hold your desires without collapsing. Psychologically speaking, this is about how you manage your inner life to create synergy with your outer life:

• It’s about weeding out the stuff in your psyche that’ll cause you to screw up or self-sabotage when good things come your way.

• It’s about healing the hole in your chest that throbs when you lose access to the things or people that usually numb it.

• It’s about holding your desires lightly enough to still feel good in the present—with or without others’ attention.

Figuring this stuff out? This is also part of the self-mastery journey.

And it’s because it’s a “journey” that grants access to sustainable attractiveness that there’s likely little point using artificial enhancement as a shortcut.

Sure, you’ll get a bit of a boost.

But if your Rambo-sized guns or BBL open too many doors too soon, you’re at risk of fucking up whatever opportunities come your way because you haven’t gone far enough along the journey of self-mastery to step fully over the threshold.

My Ass Experiment

For most of my twenties, my number-one priority was professional advancement. And for the performance-focused industry I was in, seducing selection panels into hiring me wasn’t going to work.

The consequence was that I didn’t worry much about my appearance.

I focused on developing other branches of the virtue skill tree—like my learning ability, teamwork, and perseverance. The result is that those years of being “mid” never really blocked me from getting the things I wanted.

But now, my priorities are completely unrecognizable.

I’m now busy hammering my glutes in the gym, trying to earn a dumptruck.

Why am I bothering with this all of a sudden?

First, I want to see whether progress comes quickly thanks to my African genes. Because who doesn’t love an easy win?

Second, I’m curious to test the science for myself.

What is the total magnetic pull of an ass that won’t quit? Will it, or won’t it, increase the number of men who approach me, and will they be more inclined to start giving me useful stuff?

It’s not that I have trouble sourcing my own steak dinners and seaside getaways, but this experiment in human nature is one I’m just too curious not to run.

And finally, I’m doing it for the post-workout high, which continues to exceed my expectations the harder I push myself. Because at my core, I’m just a bored junkie chasing healthier ways to have fun.

So, curiosity, curiosity, and pleasure are my motivations.

These motivations feel more sustainable—and more intrinsic—than anything I’d have had access to throughout my 20s.

So, I’m grateful I discovered working out when I did and not a moment sooner when it’s effects wouldn’t have lit me up and afforded me the benefits they do now.

Closing Thoughts

When you’re attractive, life and other people tend to give you more of the things you want. But the fastest path to such magnetism may not require a focus on beauty at all.

Hell, a 30-minute makeup routine might actually slow you down.

It’s the journey of self-mastery—in whatever domain is actually yours—that makes you inherently magnetic enough to get what you want out of life.

At which point beauty becomes redundant. Just a tool, not the point.

Too many people don’t understand this. So everyone’s trying to sculpt themselves into a socially prescribed ideal, which is insane. Because that’s like everyone trying to become Olympic swimmers.

We can’t all do that life path.

Only some of us got assigned that one.

So think carefully about whether trying to look like Kim K or Arnold Schwarzenegger will really get you what you want.

Are you sure you’re not overinvesting your energy in an oversaturated market—or dampening your natural glow? And are you sure there’s not some other underdeveloped dimension of yourself worth focusing on instead?

Because in the end, it’s balanced personal mastery—not beauty alone—that grants you lasting access to life’s goodies.

Thanks for reading. If this post made you rethink your New Year’s resolutions, I hope at least one of them just quietly dissolved.

And if you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more conceptual nitpicking, course-corrective nudges, and the occasional brag about my PRs at the gym.

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There's a peculiar side effect of spiritual work that nobody warns you about in the meditation apps.

It's that more people will fall in love with you.

Not because you’ve cracked some tantric seduction code, but because something shifts in how you occupy space. And other people’s unconscious minds can smell it across a room.

The Psychology of Authentic Presence

When you start clearing out the psychological debris—living non-conflicted and in alignment—you’re presenting yourself completely authentically and non-defensively.

It’s like you become an unblemished pane of glass.

Something about being so “clear” automatically presents an undistorted reflection. You become a mirror—one that reflects back truth.

In other words, being truly yourself automatically shines a spotlight on everyone else’s unresolved material.

Something in people’s psyches detects this quality before their rational mind even knows what's happening. The unconscious whispers: “This person can help us.” The soul thinks: “This person can free us.”

And so their five senses lock onto the outer signs of your inner usefulness.

Suddenly, you've caught someone's attention, and their rational mind scrambles for a socially acceptable explanation for this magnetic pull.

It usually settles on one of two options: fascination or revulsion.

They either find you entrancing or deeply unsettling. Love you or hate you. And because these are just different faces of the same psychological coin, they can't look away regardless.

The Inevitable Psychological Drama

Here's where things get unpredictable.

When someone decides that they love you rather than hate you, they sink deeper into their appreciation of qualities they think belong to you.

All the while, they fail to realize that those facets of appreciation are either just parts of themselves gone unrecognized or cast members they’ve enlisted in their retelling of some unresolved psychodrama from their past.

And like any good drama, the tension must build.

Eventually, those sunny qualities they adored become unbearable to them. What once felt like salvation now feels like judgment. The very clarity that drew them in begins to illuminate shadows they'd rather keep hidden.

Cue shrieking.

Here, they may run away—self-sabotaging before you can get any further under their skin. Alternatively, conflict will erupt, and it won’t be productive because they’ll be falsely perceiving everything that’s happening through the lens of their past pain.

They’ve made you out to be a monster in their head when, in reality, you know you’re just being yourself.

The Three Predictable Responses

Depending on whether you’re familiar with what’s going on, sexy ol’ you will do one of three things…

1. Continue being yourself while the other person spirals into increasingly dramatic reactions, ultimately exploding and chasing you away;

2. Attempt a swift and painless exit, aware that this always happens and thus never allowing yourself to get too attached in the first place; or

3. Turn the other cheek and continue treating the person with kindness, understanding that their reaction has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their unfinished business with themselves.

This final approach creates an interesting fork in the road.

The Resolution or Resistance Fork

Sometimes your steady love cracks the other open, allowing integration to happen and freedom to come rushing in.

Alternatively, they’ll just resist you even harder.

The more they fight, the more they sabotage their unconscious mind's original mission when it sent them wandering into your orbit in the first place.

If you choose not to stick around while they thrash, there’s a chance the pain of your departure might crack them open later. Kind of like a time bomb you strapped to their heart, set to detonate whenever they're finally ready to face what you reflected back to them.

But if you’re a truly unshakable villain?

They’ll inevitably repeat the lesson some other way—with some other person or in some other situation. That’s the beauty and the curse of growth: Class is always in session until you pass.

In Conclusion…

Making others fall in love with you just by breathing is one of the underappreciated ways your inner work promises to make the world a better place. Because when you start vibrating high, that vibration echoes, causing others to shake when they spot you across the room.

So do your inner work. It’ll get you noticed. But more importantly, it’ll shake the collective awake.

That's not just sexy. That's revolutionary.

Thanks for tuning in. If the taboo and rarely talked-about corners of spiritual growth resonate with you, subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more unfiltered takes on consciousness, chaos, and the messy magic of love.

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Last week, I wrote about how the universe sends me soul-stirring connections not to keep, but to crack me open so I can crawl back to my laptop and create something profound.

But this week, I’m seeing it differently.

Less “thank you for the growth” and more “why the hell has my entire life been shaped by this gaping ache for connection I can never seem to keep?”

So far, my discovery is this:

Hold onto your hats—this is another sad one.

When Scarcity Steers the Whole Ship

When you learn lack early, you start making moves based on fear, not desire. And fear is a terrible captain.

My earliest memory of disconnection is on a daycare swing set at age three, clocking the vibe and thinking: These kids are feral. I'm doomed.

You see, my stay-at-home mother, bless her spiritually-aware soul, made the fatal error of providing excellent company.

She was what I'd call “energetically hygienic.”

She didn't projectile vomit her neuroses onto everyone in a five-foot radius, and she was protective of my little nervous system in a way most parents just aren’t conscious enough to be.

Wise to think ahead to my social development, she sent me to daycare a few days a week where I would reliably isolate myself on the swing set instead of mingling with my peers.

My energetically sensitive, neurodivergent ass found the other kids too loud and too chaotic, and so I’d spend the days counting down the hours until I could go home—back where the energy didn’t feel like sandpaper.

School: Where Dreams Go to Die

By the time grade school arrived, the survival algorithm changed: Do whatever it takes to avoid being alone—because loneliness equals bullying—but minimize the energetic toxicity you absorb in the process.

This wasn’t easy.

Coming from a working-class Australian town, my classmates weren't exactly radiating wellness; many of them had alcoholic, abusive, or neglectful parents.

Consequently, self-harm, eating disorders, and budding personality disorders surrounded me on all sides. And when puberty hit everyone at once, it was like being caught in a storm of other people’s suffering.

It got so bad, I tried to escape by following a friend who left for an arts college, only to get a massive dose of what I’d been trying to avoid—social ostracism.

I fled back to my original school after just nine weeks.

Forced back into the hormonal wilderness, I had to make the best of a bad situation. My strategy was to secure companionship in a boyfriend. Immediately.

It didn't matter who it was.

Using my ability to see the potential in anyone, I saw the good in a guy who wasn’t great and learned that dissociating while handing myself over as a sex object could solve my short-term problems.

The Most Painful Part? I Knew Better

This wasn't about low self-esteem—my mother had inoculated me against that particular plague. I could spot quality humans from across a room.

This was about learned scarcity.

My first crush at age twelve was kind, intelligent, and radiated what I'd now recognize as high-vibrational energy through his quiet, non-dogmatic Christianity.

This was before I had any spiritual beliefs myself, yet I remember staring dumfounded at him, thinking: You're it. You're exactly the caliber of human I need in my life.

Sadly, he barely knew I existed. Then he moved interstate.

“Just study your way into a good university,” I instructed myself—my skull banging against a headboard. “Better humans await.”

Happiness Begets Abundance

University delivered marginal improvements, and after dumping my boyfriend, I eventually snagged a sweet guy I'd been crushing on for four years.

Things were looking up.

And so, the universe responded the way it does—with happiness begetting abundance. I went on exchange to a top university in Tokyo and discovered just how spectacular human connection could be.

These weren't just university-level intelligent humans. They were funny, sexy, adventurous, and every other adjective that makes life worth living.

It was a semester-long experience so transcendent that I lived off the memory for three years, writing a novel just to process the withdrawal.

Returning to my regular life felt like going from IMAX to a broken television.

Nothing—not my relationship, not my friendships—felt nourishing compared to that peak experience, and so I grew depressed.

I left my boyfriend for another whose spark approximated what I'd experienced in Japan and planned to return to the country after graduation.

I didn’t make it back in the end, but it didn’t matter. Because when that long relationship ended in my late 20s, I discovered something surprising.

I was actually content in solitude.

In fact, I was suddenly the happiest I’d ever been. My career was kicking off, and I was convinced I was ready to be single forever...

But then the cycle repeated.

Once again, my happiness—like spoken magic words—attracted more abundance.

The connection I'd always craved—a spiritual guy who looked suspiciously like my twelve-year-old crush—materialized and then vanished, leaving me more hopeless than before.

It’s Always the Same

I find the good stuff, soak in it, and then lose it—thanks to life circumstances, geography, or divine comedy. Each time, I throw myself into work, fueled by one core belief:

It’s been the unconscious driver behind nearly everything I’ve done, and last night, I realized something confronting.

My current efforts to build a spiritual business are tainted. It’s just the same goddamn thing in new packaging.

I figured this out by running a simple simulation:

Imagine you knew for a fact that everything you’re trying to build would never bring you the connection you long for. Would you keep going?

My motivation evaporated as my body responded with a firm “no.” And when my mind emptied with the dropping of everything I thought I wanted, one question remained.

“What the hell do I do now?”

The answer, apparently, is to cry, grieve, and sink into the emptiness.

No chasing. No transmuting. Just surrender.

With my motivation gurgling down the drain, I feel no momentum toward anything meaningful. This is depriving me of hope and making way for a despair that I’ve never slowed down long enough to feel.

I don’t have the energy to rebuild on yet another shaky foundation.

The way I see it, I have no choice but to do nothing—to wait and observe how deep this long-held ache for connection really goes.

Final Thoughts

I’m still in the messy middle of this, and so I don’t have a tidy takeaway.

Maybe this is the part of the hero’s journey where transcendence kicks in. Or maybe it’s just a depressive slump in a Thai condo.

All I know is—I’m grieving. Not just another muse, but the whole damn strategy.

If my ambition has always been a workaround for loneliness, the answer isn’t working harder—it’s grieving deeper, which is a tough pill to swallow.

Thanks for reading this particularly sad installment of The Aussie Mystic. I hope it inspires you to double-check that your ambitions aren’t just a cover for pain you’d rather avoid.

If this resonated—or you’d like to cheer me up—subscribe for what will hopefully be some less-sad reflections in the future.

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That said, If I go quiet for a while, it’s because I’m still sitting in the wreckage, figuring out what’s worth rebuilding—and how. Thanks in advance for your patience.

This was my astrologer’s prognosis back in January.

I wasn't ready to hear it, and I definitely wasn't ready to accept it. But here I am, six months later, spiraling through the grief of dreams that never got off the ground.

In this week’s stream of consciousness, I’m exploring my love life through a new lens and fresh tears. Will I find acceptance by the end of the post?

Your guess is as good as mine.

The Pattern I Can’t Unsee

Here’s what I’ve discovered.

Every intense infatuation I’ve ever had has been less about the person and more about the professional or creative quantum leap that came after. The pattern is shockingly consistent.

I’ve always wanted a soulmate—someone who’s loving, peaceful, and doesn’t bore me to tears.

But it's not happening smoothly.

What I’ve gotten instead are beautiful disasters—the majority of which have been doomed from the start. These catastrophes continued long after I was wise enough, and healed enough, to bear witness to their unfolding.

"This is objectively a mess and I deserve better," something in me could see with crystal clarity. "But I still feel all this love. Why?"

Each time, the crash of disappointment hurt like hell.

And each time, like clockwork, it set something else in motion. Pain would transmute into creative energy and drive to do something bold.

Thanks to the shockwaves of my past loves, I learned how to write, built a business, quit my job, moved cities, and started building a better business—in that order.

None of the major milestones in my creative-professional life were ignited while I was in a state of peace and contentment. Every creative milestone followed the breakdown of a romance that meant too much.

And in almost every case, that person was a preview of the next phase of my work. I don’t know if that’s called a “muse” or a “cosmic prank.”

All I know is that it just keeps happening.

Even The Friendships Were Foreshadowing

I once wrote a letter listing every friend who’d faded or been pulled away by the tides of time. It was well over a dozen names long and read like a eulogy for a social life I never quite got to keep.

The ones that stung the most? They were the ones tied to the themes I’d later build my life around.

The sweet Christian friend who showed me what spiritual integrity looked like. The friend I made silly videos with before anyone called it “content.” And when those friendships ended, the grief felt disproportionate.

But now I get it.

Apparently, my path has always been paved with premature goodbyes—each one hitting harder the more that person reflected a version of me I hadn’t yet grown into.

The Elephant-Sized Pattern In The Room

I’m honestly embarrassed I didn’t spot this life trend sooner.

• Three people is a pattern. I’m sitting on nearly ten.

• Almost everyone I’ve dated has said they felt second to my work.

• I resent this entire realization, which probably means it’s true.

• And my astrologer warned me about all of this.

This astrologer spent years living in an ashram and used a large, complicated system of cards that he designed himself, combining two Vedic systems into one.

So, not your casual pop-astrology reader.

When I re-listened to our session recently, two things stuck out to me.

First, he successfully predicted things that weren't even possibilities in my brain at the time I got the reading.

Second, I can now hear how much he struggled to find something promising to say about my love life. There's no way I was ready to accept that struggle before.

But on this second listen? The wincing was audible.

He said it flat out: I’d probably only find love through work. Specifically, with people doing the kind of work I want to be doing next, which is exactly what’s already been happening:

• I dated a writer. I became a writer.

• I crushed on a guy who made coaching tools. I started making coaching tools.

• I dated a traveling content creator. I became a traveling content creator.

Can it get any more transparently orchestrated than that? What the actual hell is going on here?

Sometimes recognition of a pattern ends the pattern. But judging by my astrologer's wincing prognosis, I suspect I'm dealing with some soul-coded nonsense that may not dissolve under the strength of this newfound awareness.

Somehow, I must surrender to this.

The Muse Theory

I'm trying to accept that my love life may be less of a "life" and more of a sequence of incoming and outgoing muses, accompanied by inevitable pain.

Do I want that? Absolutely not.

Do I need it?

If what I believe about my soul’s curriculum is true, then I definitely needed every painful iteration so far. I was too comfortable, not aiming high enough, and needed the emotional kick to spark my imagination.

Nothing else would have roused me from my comfort.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe that’s what it looks like to live in devotion to creativity. Maybe muses don’t stick around. Maybe inspiration requires loss, and some of us get assigned that shitty contract.

Spirituality often confuses us into thinking there's something fundamentally wrong with "going without,” but there isn't, even if that absence leads to a yearning for what's been foregone.

Final Thoughts

I don’t have a tidy bow to wrap around all this. But I’ll leave you with this—the new belief I’m experimenting with holding:

Even if it breaks. Even if it ends. Even if it was never really yours to begin with.

If it shaped you, stretched you, or shoved you closer to your path, then it served its purpose.

And that’s not nothing.

Thanks for letting me ugly-cry onto the page. If you cried while reading this, consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic—because misery loves a spiritually informed audience.

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When I was growing up, my dad had one clear instruction for my future:

I’ve got no plans to become a stripper.

But lately, I’ve been re-examining this well-meaning fatherly advice. Join me for this week’s mini-download, filed under: things I didn’t expect to feel guilty about while trying to get paid.

When You Unconsciously Want to Fail

Picture your subconscious as a particularly stubborn filing cabinet.

Years of conditioning get shoved into folders marked "acceptable" and "absolutely not," often without our conscious permission. The problem? These files often contain some surprisingly counterproductive instructions.

The more conflicts in the cabinet, the more likely you’ll unconsciously self-sabotage when trying to achieve your goals because an unacknowledged part of you feels uncomfortable with the conditions for success.

Here’s my example of this…

I’ve been working on a virtual coaching offer that I can already tell is going to get picked up by a subset of male clients.

This is exactly how coaching businesses tend to go; you don’t start winning until you experiment enough to discover the niche you’re best equipped to serve.

So, happy to have found mine, I began asking myself: What the hell do I charge?

I meditated on it, tuned in, and waited for the universe to drop a number on my mental whiteboard. And when $300/hour popped into my head, instantly, I felt resistance.

Not because what I’m offering isn’t worth it. It absolutely is.

But because some dusty little moral ledger in my subconscious flicked on and whispered this.

Welcome to Money Block Theatre

If you've never heard the term "money block," it's basically a subconscious belief that sabotages your ability to receive, hold, or grow money. And this one came straight from my shadow.

Turns out, even though I've intellectually rejected the whole "money corrupts the sacred" mythology that keeps therapists and coaches financially struggling, some version of a block had set up camp in my psyche anyway.

I’ve had a tiny accountant in my brain who's been programmed by a Victorian morality handbook.

Despite a lifetime of supporting male friends and partners on their self-development journeys, I’d unconsciously written them off as potential clients, all because of some shadowy association I unconsciously judged.

Meanwhile, in Mirror Land, my ex was literally an OF creator (iykyk). And here I was, feeling shame about transactional intimacy.

What a sense of humor the universe has.

Rewriting the Ledger

Here’s the dusty equation in my subconscious, quietly blocking an entire demographic from accessing my work:

Male + Money + Emotional Labor = Sex Work

To clear it, I slapped this on a digital post-it I see daily: "Sharing your energy with people of the opposite sex in exchange for money isn’t a moral failing."

Then I reframed it in the positive so it would stick better:

And that, my friends, is what shadow work looks like in practice.

Share your own shadow-work downloads in the comments.

Bonus points if they involve money, sex, or power—the trinity of topics we're all pretending we don't think about constantly.

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Remember, if the shadow starts whispering nonsense, light a candle, call its bluff, and invoice anyway. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more downloads from the dark side today.

This week, I want to talk about my latest hyperfixation: the mass calling-out of spiritual content creator Aubrey Marcus.

It’s captivated me the way a house fire might because the controversy has laid bare a string of psycho-spiritual confusions I’ve personally carried around for years. These confusions afforded me some great lessons, but also spurred a lot of pain.

If I can help someone else avoid falling into the same traps, I figured that would be a good use of my time—so here we go.

Who the Hell is Aubrey Marcus and What Happened?

I’ll give the backstory as efficiently as I can.

Marcus is a 44-year-old modern spiritual content creator who’s recently built a large following. He’s masculine on the surface but enjoys poetry and frequent participation in “medicine ceremonies.”

Marcus is known for living a pleasure-centric lifestyle, which includes polyamorous relationships.

In the early stages of his relationship with his now-wife (Vylana; 38), she was hesitant about all this. But steadily, the pair shifted from a monogamish relationship into a non-monogamous arrangement.

One day, mid-workout, Marcus hears a voice he perceives as higher guidance. The voice tells him to pause his set and check his dating app because he’s going to meet someone important.

Enter: Alana (27)

The three hit it off, and Alana is added to the pair’s relationship structure.

But the mystical voice soon strikes again—this time in the Pyramids of Egypt—telling Marcus he now needs to impregnate both women.1

Reluctantly, but adhering to his belief in radical honesty and transparency, Marcus shares this revelation with his wife, and emotional turmoil erupts between them. Marcus assures Vylana that if she wants to leave him, he’ll take care of her financially.

She ultimately decides to stay.

This drama culminates in a podcast episode featuring Marcus, Vylana, and Alana, together with their “expert” teacher—a guy who has a whole website dedicated to defending himself against public controversy.2

In 2.5 hours, they describe where the relationship has landed: with Vylana having pushed through a mountain of “triggers” to arrive at “choosing this for herself.”

She cries a couple times throughout the episode, but all-in-all, their relationship structure is described by all in poetic, high-vibe terms—subtly-not-subtly presenting it as a new, possibly more enlightened evolution of union.

The result?

The entire spiritual community called “bullshit.”

Rather than the typical online vitriol, commenters and other content creators took time to respectfully explain the psychological and spiritual problems with the situation, and their responses blew me away.

They weren’t cruel. They were wise and loving.

Some came from spiritual teachers and theologians, others somatic therapists and psychologists—all nailing the issue from different angles.

So what did Marcus do for the finale?

He responded with another two-hour podcast episode, featuring his ex-fiancé as a character witness.

He framed the responses as bullying, fake-cried, and positioned himself as a martyr—claiming that if the world needed to falsely project onto him as a hiccup in their own spiritual evolution, he would accept that role as a catalyst for human consciousness.

Holy moly—AMIRITE?

Why This Captivated Me

Here's the embarrassing truth: If I’d heard that original podcast without the commentary surrounding it, I’d have bought everything they were saying.

Thankfully, the commentary did exist.

So, as I watched this spiritual car crash unfold, I felt knots of my own confusion—accumulated over years of navigating similar dynamics—slowly untangle. People far wiser than me were dissecting psychological patterns I'd previously found convincing and seductive.

Because here's the thing.

Much of what Marcus presents to his audience contains truth. Radical honesty is valuable. Examining our triggers can be transformative. But the problem isn't the concepts—it's how they're wielded.

Here are the three biggest distortions that came to light for me throughout this saga.

Fallacy 1: Total Honesty Is the Same as Moral Integrity

Marcus attempts to align himself with the queer community's struggle for authenticity, claiming he's simply living his polyamorous truth. At the same time, he positions his transparency as the loving alternative to betrayal, with frequent reference to infidelity statistics.

This is the spiritual loophole Marcus exploits the most: “I didn’t lie. I was radically transparent. Therefore, I’m acting with integrity.”

The truth?

Sometimes, true integrity sometimes means telling yourself the truth and then setting a boundary with yourself, the same way you’d say no to a child who wants candy for dinner.

Because not every impulse ought to be acted upon.

The internet highlighted what appeared to be some combination of a sex, love, and drug addiction, cataloguing Marcus as a “bliss-seeker”—a distorted type of spirituality where pleasure becomes an experience to be chased rather than a gift among life’s other feeling states.

This is essentially the “feminine” principle run amok.

Honesty. Love. Free-spiritedness.

These are good things, but only when accompanied equally by their healthy masculine counterpart. In the absence of this, you get an overabundance of the feminine. That is, chaos without boundaries.

My Experience

I recognize this pattern because I lived it.

I was recently in a relationship with someone who embodied pure feminine energy—chaotic, impulsive, child-like. Coming from my own over-dominance of masculine energy, I fell head-over-heels in love.

My nervous system was at the whim of this guy’s impulses—including his lust—and I tried to convince myself to be satisfied with the fact that he was at least honest and transparent about these whims.

Perceiving him as genuinely well-intentioned, I tried to namaste my way through red flags and understand the ways I must be the problem.

Was I too attached? Was I too judgmental? Did I just need to work through my triggers?

I woke up every morning feeling like I wanted to throw up, constantly bracing myself for whatever next spanner was about to hit me in the head.

I was both relieved and devastated the day I decided to throw in the towel.

Fallacy 2: Spiritual Surrender and “Surrendering to Every Impulse” are The Same

What Marcus fundamentally misunderstands is that being a man is about taking responsibility for your impulses, not just being honest about them. It's about building containers strong enough to hold your desires without them destroying everything you touch.

The fallacy here is that Marcus conflates spiritual surrender with surrendering to every impulse. But without practicing the masculine principle—structure, boundaries, responsibility—he’s neglecting the things he should actually be doing if he wants to grow and find peace with his wife.

Without the container masculine energy provides, “free love” becomes a euphemism for boundaryless indulgence—and it’s usually the woman’s nervous system who pays the price.

The sacred container of monogamy isn't about restriction. It's about creating safety.

When a woman feels genuinely secure in her man's devotion—when she trusts that his energy isn't scattered across multiple partners—she can relax into her own essence. This creates a feedback loop of mutual fulfilment that no amount of "radical fidelity"3 can replicate.

Can polyamory work? My guess is: Theoretically—with tremendous effort and resources.

But it requires a level of masculine presence and provision that most men simply can't sustain across multiple relationships. There are only so many hours in the day, and there is only so much emotional bandwidth to distribute.

Marcus seems far more interested in collecting peak experiences than in doing the mundane work of creating genuine safety and stability. In doing so, he’s trying to brute-force his way into paradise without understanding that, as a man, he's responsible for building its walls.

My Own Detective Work

I once knew someone who was running this same false logic.

Partying, sex, always on dating apps, drugs every weekend—together with his wild, free-spirited girlfriend. Their total openness, acceptance, and in-the-moment spirit was fascinating enough that it made me put on my detective hat and go undercover.

I decided to get lightly involved with them.

I sniffed away at their lifestyle, trying to figure out what the hell they knew that allowed them to be the way they were with all its admitted upsides.

But quickly, I discovered their chaos was completely intolerable to my nervous system.

Their lifestyle was one of intense highs, crashing lows, and a revolving door of lovers who seemingly couldn’t handle them either. They didn’t appear to be learning anything, and it was all clearly placing strain on the woman of the pair, who was the man’s emotional anchor whenever he felt distressed.

My girl hard-on dead, I slid off my disguise and slid on my stethoscope instead. I suggested to the male of the pair that he might want to learn some self-regulation skills—like meditation.

In response, he chose to wear his mental health diagnosis as a shield against a need to examine his behavior.

I was swiftly accused of being judgmental.

And with that, I quietly bounced.

Fallacy 3: Jealousy Is Always a Wound to Heal

Throughout the saga, jealousy is consistently framed as a "trigger" to be transcended or wound to be worked through. But this assumes jealousy is always a low-vibration kink in the system, rather than a feature of being human.

We sometimes feel jealousy in response to boundary violations.

Provided you are accurately perceiving the boundaries around what is yours, jealousy is the right emotion to feel when those boundaries get crossed. And—bit controversial—but it’s natural for a man to take what’s called “healthy ownership” of his woman.

If you’re wincing at this statement, that’s only because society has mistakenly convinced you that “ownership” and “control” are one and the same.

They are not. Go watch this video.

The spiritual community's tendency to pathologize all negative emotions as "triggers to transcend" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of embodied spirituality. True spiritual development isn't about transcending our humanity—it's about learning to live in harmony with it.

We have negative emotions for a reason, and Marcus assumes that we’ve evolved past whatever jealousy’s purpose is—something we cannot know for sure.

I’m not speaking from the bleachers here.

I’ve been in an open relationship and can say from experience there is certainly benefit to confronting your jealousy head-on. For me, the buried content this relationship brought to the surface helped me resolve key insecurities and fears of abandonment.

So, I’m glad for those experiences.

But there's a profound difference between conscious exploration and spiritual bypassing—between examining your triggers and positioning every natural human response as a spiritual failing.

A man who channels his territorial energy into devoted protection and provision will find himself a woman who feels safe enough to fully surrender into her femininity.

In exchange for his devotion, he gets a container in which to still let his impulses have some free rein. Because a wife who feels your devotion, trusts you, respects you, and feels taken care of by you will be just as happy as you are when the sun sets and it’s time to have some fun.

Doesn’t that sound way better than a revolving door of flesh?

I sure think so.

It’s giving up to ultimately gain. You know—the delayed gratification we learned as kids?4 There’s a difference between undifferentiated love and wanting to stick your dick in everything.

The latter is positioning immediate pleasure as your god.

It’s positioning pleasure above the potential for something deeper and better. But to get there, you have to negotiate with the future—an essential skill we all need as grown-ups.

Marcus Missed the Mark

Here’s the crux.

Most of modern spirituality is a feminine response to the legacy of toxic masculinity. But in rejecting one distortion, we’ve embraced another.

Healthy love isn’t boundary-less. Healthy masculinity isn’t just honesty.

And the spiritual path doesn’t mean indulging every instinct under the guise of liberation. It means learning which instincts to honor and which ones to transform.

The Greek word for “sin” isn’t about wrongdoing. It means “to miss the mark.”

And on this one? Marcus definitely missed the mark.

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Who knew I could write spiritual journalism? If you enjoyed the drama and downloads, subscribe to The Aussie Mystic, where I make sense of the woo so you hopefully don’t end up in a polyamorous pyramid scheme.

I'm in the middle of discovering an entirely different way to live—a mode where I let myself be animated by enthusiasm instead of that joyless taskmaster in my head screaming about to-do lists and overdue milestones.

What does my enthusiasm want when it's not being bullied by survival mode?

Apparently, it’s to lay very, very still and do absolutely nothing.

I had a hunch this lifestyle would suit me. I’d tasted its bliss on a 10-day meditation retreat. And I was slightly terrified of tasting it again because something in me knew that if I did without external structures to support me, my life and all my responsibilities would collapse like a house of cards.

It turns out I was 100% correct.

Which is precisely why I spent five years engineering my escape route before attempting this experiment in human-scale living.

Here’s what I’ve discovered so far: We've been systematically gaslit in the West into thinking that our stress and inability to relax are personal failings and character defects requiring individual solutions.

They are not. Here’s why.

My Accidental Meditation Retreat

Since moving to Southeast Asia, my days have naturally settled into a rhythm that would make any efficiency expert weep:

• 10:00am: Wake up blissed out and at peace in my body. Lie in bed savoring that feeling for an hour, maybe drift back to sleep.

• 11:00am: Do 50 minutes of vinyasa yoga in my living room.

• 11:50am: Bask in endorphins for an hour on the couch. Maybe nap some more.

• 12:50pm: Cook and eat my first meal of the day.

• 1:30pm: Rest and digest for another hour. Maybe sleep again.

• 2:30pm: Start working.

• 4:30pm: Eat some fruit.

• 4:45pm: Work some more.

• 6:45pm: Cook and eat my second meal.

• 7:15pm: Rest and digest for 30 minutes. Maybe fall asleep (yes, again).

• 7:45pm: Work, write, play, create, spiral into spiritual inquiry. Dealer’s choice.

• 3:00am: Snack and sleep.

Lighting is warm and dim, social interaction is minimal, caffeine is banned, and the food is fresh, keto, and cooked by human hands.

Sometimes yoga gets swapped for a jog. But that’s it. This is the schedule that emerged when I stopped letting capitalism plan my day.

My day mirrors the routines I've enjoyed on meditation retreats.

Every rest period is spent in silence or listening to peaceful audiobooks from spiritual teachers. My four hours of work feel like "selfless service." Meals are prepared with presence and focus.

I accidentally created this schedule by following what felt good instead of what felt productive. And I'm absolutely loving it.

But I had to engineer a five-year-long escape plan to safely access it, and I shouldn’t have had to.

No one should have to.

The Last Time I Lived Like a Human: The Summer of 2011

There was a brief window—summer holidays between high school and university—when this kind of rhythm felt natural.

I was on the educational conveyor belt and thus mentally at peace, figuring I was on track to accomplishing whatever the hell I was supposed to be accomplishing.

I spent this summer bicycling to my part-time job at a pie shop, coming home, and spending hours playing Elder Scrolls in blissful solitude.

A retiree coworker once asked how I looked so good, and I told her the truth: "I lounge around most of the day," I explained, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

Which it was. Animals live this way, and they are obviously more sane than us.

If I'd known these months were going to be the last I'd experience this peace for about 13 years, perhaps I would have appreciated them more.

How Civilization Slowly Poisoned My Nervous System

By the time my first semester of university rolled around, I was too busy being dizzied by relationship drama to access any of this natural rhythm again. Then came a PhD, followed by a mortgage—each new obligation pulling me further from that summer of peaceful dungeon crawling.

Not only did I have to worry about my academic performance to have a career, I needed that career to work out to pay to keep a roof over my head.

Yes, I can hear myself—what I'm describing is some version of the average person's life. But that’s the point. This is what passes for "normal."

With the piling on of these obligations, I strayed further and further from being able to access the peace of that summer. Before long, natural rest and relaxation were only accessible in artificial form through copious amounts of alcohol and weed.

This worked for a while. But that healthy glow my coworker observed? Long gone.

I became fat, gassy, and was slowly destroying my health. Although none of this bothered me much because my ego quickly became infatuated with my hard work and growing intelligence.

In essence, I traded off vitality for achievement. But I shouldn’t have had to.

I’ll repeat: No one should have to.

The “Soft Girl” Rebellion

I’ve recently begun seeing women on TikTok talking about the battle it takes to earn the "soft girl life,” and they’re not wrong.

You don’t glide into this lifestyle I’m now living. You claw your way into it, bloodied and panting, holding a half-finished vision board and your sixth coffee of the day.

Something wiser in me began plotting my escape in 2020 when an old connection described his freelancing life in Bali—private chefs and beachside views, all for writing online.

I could write. I'd been doing it drunk at 2am for years.

So I took the courses, built the skills, and fused academic prowess into my work. Five clumsy years of business-building later, and here I am—in Vietnam, working online, living exactly that life.

Having quit my stable job, I’ve surrendered to the fact that I'm now priced out of my home country. In exchange, I’ve now crested Soft Girl Mountain—I’m still panting on its ledge (i.e., catching up on sleep).

Was it worth it? Abso-fucking-lutely.

But I'm still furious that this level of upheaval was necessary to access basic human functioning.

This meditation retreat lifestyle I’m living is doubling as a self-imposed rehab, where I’m deprogramming ten years of survival conditioning.

I’m reconditioning survival habits like…

• reaching for stimulants under the guise of productivity instead of pausing to eat something nutritious;

• working at the speed of light when I don't have to; and

• feeling guilty for taking a day off instead of diving headfirst into my to-do list.

My current rehabilitation goal? Slowing down to chew my food properly.

Yes, my need for speed has been so pervasive that I've been eating like a panicked duck my entire adult life, wolfing down whatever was in front of me to "get back to work"—a habit which has contributed to a lifetime of digestive problems.

I’m retraining myself in the extreme. It feels both pathetic—like I'm a domesticated animal learning to be wild again—and revolutionary.

The Gaslighting Industrial Complex

This is the part where I get angry.

Every self-help book, every wellness app, every "five-minute meditation" suggests that our inability to relax is a personal failing requiring individual solutions.

Practice gratitude. Try this breathing technique. Mindfully sip your coffee first thing in the morning (which is ironic, considering caffeine is part of the problem).

These interventions are the equivalent of trying to clean up a tsunami with a mop. They're a gaslight served with a scented candle, shifting blame to individuals trapped in a system that's fundamentally hostile to human life.

We've built a civilization where basic human needs—rest, community, purpose that isn't tied to survival—have become luxury items available only to those who can afford to opt out entirely.

The West has convinced us that if we can't function optimally within this framework, we're the problem. But the truth? The framework itself is insane.1

Concluding Thoughts From Soft Girl Summit

Not every moment of the last 13 years was bad. I grew. I achieved. I built discipline.

But when I reached the peak of those ventures and realized all that was ahead of me was the promise of more of the same, I had an existential crisis. I'm just lucky I had my freelancing business to catch me.

I'm not advocating that everyone flee to Southeast Asia like I have. But I am suggesting we stop pretending that our collective inability to rest is a character defect.

Young people resigning to be NEETs aren't lazy—they're having a rational response to an irrational system. The American dream isn't inspirational—it's a painful lie wrapped in motivational quotes.

And remember: We used to live in extended families, sharing resources and responsibilities. Now, we isolate ourselves in nuclear units, strangling ourselves with individual mortgages while wondering why community feels impossible.

The West has created a system where rest becomes suspicious, where productivity is virtue, and where basic human rhythms are treated as character defects. We've been sold the idea that if we can't relax within this framework, we need better time management skills.

From this new vantage point—Soft Girl Summit—I can assure you this is all a lie.

I've got much more to say about this, but I'm not in a rush. I'm still trying to get my breath back after playing Sisyphus for the last 13 years.

So if you'll excuse me, I have a very important nap to attend to.

Wasn’t that a doozy? That’s what happens when I get mad!

If this post made you a little mad too, then you’re exactly who I write for. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more psycho-spiritual scoldings, soft girl dispatches, and the occasional nap-fueled revelation today.

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I’ve got a deceptively simple insight for you this week—one that might totally rearrange your understanding of yourself in the universe.

It landed for me after listening to one of my favorite spiritual teachers discuss birth and death in a way that has my brain reorganizing its understanding of life’s basics.1

Let’s see if I can pass that understanding on to you without devolving into woo-woo drivel.

The Lie of Separation

The insight is this: Language tricks us into seeing separation where none actually exists. We carve up reality with words in ways that give us power but don't reflect the true nature of things.

To start, consider your hand. You can point to it, name it, even paint its nails.

But where exactly does your "hand" end and your "arm" begin? The boundary is conceptual—useful for getting stuff done, but ultimately arbitrary. Your hand isn't separate from the rest of you any more than a wave is separate from the ocean.

This same principle applies to everything we think of as distinct "things" in the world.

Consider a tree…

You never see a tree separate from soil, sunlight, and the surrounding air unless you’ve yanked it out of the ground and shoved it into a glass box.

And if you did these things, it would quickly die.

The elements we think of as "sustaining" the tree aren't really separate from the tree. They are the tree.

The soil doesn't feed the tree—the soil is part of the tree system. The sun doesn't shine on the tree—the sun is part of what makes the tree possible. Remove any element, and the "tree" ceases to exist.

What we call a tree is actually a temporary organization of earth, water, air, and sunlight. A flowing process that we've frozen in language and called a "thing."

This principle extends to creatures in nature. A garden makes snails. A reef makes fish. A jungle makes monkeys.

These environments express themselves through the beings they produce, like vines popping grapes into existence. Grapes aren’t separate from the vine; animals aren’t separate from the habitats that shape them.

And humans? Alan Watts put it beautifully: "The Earth 'peoples' the way an apple tree 'apples.'"2

Where Did You Grow From?

Apparently, in some Asian languages, young children don't ask their nervous parents "Where did I come from?" but rather, "Where did I grow from?"

This gets at something essential.

Everything that keeps you alive is liquid, gases, and matter from your surroundings. You're still just more environment, temporarily organized in a walking, talking pattern.

We are, quite literally, animated compost.

When I really sat with that, I stopped seeing myself as a separate object and instead started seeing myself as an unfolding process.

But here’s where I ran into a problem…

The Illusion of Hard Starts and Stops

I initially struggled with thinking of life as this fluid, continuous process I’m describing because it’s bookended by a dramatic entrance and exit. Birth and death seem like such definitive markers of a beginning and an end.

But then I realized that even these apparently hard boundaries are conceptual illusions.

The moment we typically think of as the "start" of life—emerging from the womb—isn't really a beginning. We've been growing for nine months, sprouting like a bud on a plant. And before that, the genetic story stretches endlessly backward.

Similarly, what we call "death"—when the heart stops beating—isn't really an ending. Electrical impulses continue in the brain. Cellular processes continue in the body. The atoms that composed us return to the environment to be reorganized into new patterns.

What’s more, when I remembered that conscious awareness doesn't even align with these supposed start and end points, I got the tingles and things really started clicking.

Most of us don’t remember being born. Our sense of self takes a few years to boot up. You look at photos of baby-you and go, “Who is that potato?” Because it doesn’t feel like you.

Same is true on the way out. For many, death isn’t a sharp stop but a slow fade. Dementia, illness, sedation—we begin drifting before we’re technically gone.

So if consciousness—the thing that makes us feel like separate "selves"—doesn't even span our full biological existence, what exactly are we identifying with when we think of ourselves as distinct things?

The Continuous Wave of Becoming

Once I grasped that conscious awareness doesn't align with biological birth and death, I could more easily see that what we call life is one continuous flow—an endless process of becoming.

We don't have lives; we are life, temporarily localized.

The "hard starts" and "hard stops" we perceive aren't really that definitive. What we call life is actually a continuous process of birthing and dying, emerging and dissolving. You could arbitrarily say that you “switch” from growing to declining at the midpoint of your unknown lifespan, but that’s just more conceptual noise.

The point is that the environment is doing its thing—sprouting, blooming, peopling—through you.

We only feel separate because, somewhere along the way, consciousness flickered into awareness. We "thingified" ourselves, but you’re not a thing. You’re an event.

At some point, awareness landed in that event—you became aware of being—and because you could see yourself, you assumed you were separate. You drew a mental line around your body and said, "me."

We haven't even touched the cosmic scale, but it’s easy to extrapolate. If apple trees ‘apple’ and the Earth ‘peoples,’ then clearly, the universe ‘planets.’

Our solar system is a temporary organization of cosmic dust and energy. Our galaxy is a swirling pattern in space-time. The universe itself might be just one wave in an ocean of multiverses we can't even imagine.

At every level, what appears to be separate things are revealed to be processes, patterns, and waves in larger systems.

This is what spiritual traditions mean when they talk about "no separation" or "oneness." Not that everything is mushy and identical, but that the boundaries we perceive are conceptual conveniences rather than ultimate realities.

The truth? You never stopped being the vine, the tree, the soil, the Earth.

You just got self-conscious about it.

What This All Means

Realizing you’re a wave doesn’t diminish your significance—it deepens it.

Your anxieties about separation and death? That's the wave temporarily forgetting it's part of the ocean. The isolation you feel? That's the environment briefly losing track of its own creativity.

But waves don't actually separate from oceans, and you don't actually separate from the universe that's expressing itself as you.

So what does this mean for living your life?

To be honest, I don’t really know—I only just figured this out. But at first blush, I’d say it has an ethical implication that goes something like this:

We should aim to live out our day-to-day with more cooperation rather than competition and an appreciation for how profoundly our actions ripple outward, shaping the world just as the world shapes us.

Keep waving, friend. I'll catch you next week.

If this blew your mind a little bit, consider sticking around for more existential nudges, psycho-spiritual deep dives, and gentle reminders of who—and what—you really are. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic to keep riding the wave.

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On the afternoon of my spiritual awakening, you’d never have known I was having the most mind-blowing, trajectory-changing experience of my life.

I was just sitting on my couch… frowning slightly.

My brain had performed a full-blown trapeze act—from anguish to bliss—in the blink of an eye, and nothing about my situation or surroundings had changed.

From the outside, the event had all the flair of a paper towel soaking up a spill.

But internally, I was reeling from shock at what was being evidenced to me—the fact that our happiness has way more to do with the state of our mind than the state of our life. It was funny, mind-blowing, and at the same time, kind of boring.

But that’s why I think it’s worth talking about.

The Inciting Incident

It was mid-2021, and I’d been on a months-long campaign to impress a man.

What began as an elaborate cool-girl act—highlighting my best traits and concealing anything inconvenient or imperfect—quickly escalated into full-blown social theater. Soon, every word I spoke or texted was carefully crafted to sound breezy and charming.

This was at a time when I had no idea how to just be myself. I was all strategy, no sincerity. My whole identity was curated, optimized, and exhausting.

So when I slipped up and broke character, it felt catastrophic.

One night at this guy’s apartment, I made a mildly snarky comment. It hurt his feelings for maybe three seconds—he didn’t even care.

But I was steeped in perfectionism.

And so his brief expression of hurt felt less like a momentary crack in my facade and more like watching a priceless vase shatter in slow motion.

I apologized immediately, and he accepted it. By all accounts, the moment should’ve passed. But in my head, the curtain had dropped on months of carefully staged theater.

So, naturally, I doubled down and burst into tears right in front of him.

I was truly losing my mind.

(And to his credit, he was very nice about it.)

A Visit to Hell

The next day, I spiraled. The embarrassing scene of the previous night replayed endlessly. Every glance. Every syllable. My brain wouldn’t shut up.

Six months of meditation practice had given me just enough self-awareness to witness the spiral I was in, but not enough skill to stop it.

I couldn’t go more than 30 seconds without thinking about what happened, and all my attempts at distraction didn’t work.

So there I was—slumped on the couch, staring blankly off my balcony, while the world went on like nothing had happened.

By 4pm, I was in hell.

It felt like I’d reached the emotional equivalent of a dead end—no more thoughts to think, no more ways to reframe.

But then, from somewhere deep in my fried brain, a thought surfaced.

It was a mental surrendering—spurred by my exhaustion—to the worst-case scenario my mind had already scripted: The guy thinking I was unhinged and slow-ghosting me.

Months of effort wasted.

With those three words, I accepted the possibility that months of strategic personality curation had earned me nothing.

And then it happened.

The Most Australian Awakening Ever

I’m going to try and describe this as precisely as I can.

Some people’s awakening stories include some dropping of the “self” or sense of merging with the universe.

Mine wasn’t like that.

Instead of emptiness or everything-ness, I was flooded with the most specific sensation: Waking up in a hotel room with a week left on my vacation and a breakfast buffet waiting in the lobby.

I do not mean this as a nice-sounding metaphor.

I literally felt the exact feeling I'd had during my last trip to Bali. The identical sense of luxurious possibility—of having nothing demanding my attention except my own preferences.

I was still on my couch in my ordinary apartment, but I’d somehow accessed a completely different emotional state—one usually triggered by tropical locations and complete freedom from responsibility.

It was like my brain accidentally dialed the wrong number and connected to some parallel life where I was on holiday.

Just moments earlier, I’d been experiencing emotional bankruptcy—like the sinking regret after blowing a chunk of your net worth on something dumb and irreversible.

But, in the moment that I dropped the pain by accepting the worst-case scenario, the psychological upswing catapulted me from ego death to Balinese breakfast buffet.

If that’s not an awakening befitting of an Australian, I don’t know what is.

Why This All Clicked

The feeling of freedom lasted the rest of the evening and quickly mingled with fascination at the mystery of what I was experiencing. Thanks to my dabbling in meditation, I had just enough context to make some sense of it.

First, I understood that positive states—happiness, peace, even ecstasy—could theoretically exist independent of external circumstances. This was my basic grasp of why anyone would bother with spiritual practice.

Second, I kept seeing "surrender" described as key to spiritual growth, although I had no idea what that actually looked like in practice.

I’ve been forced to learn a lot about surrender since these days and have summarized those learnings in one place. You’re welcome in advance:

This accidental vacation suddenly illuminated both of these ideas with startling clarity.

The suffering I'd endured all day had been purely mental construction—my mind generating distress about a resolved situation. But the bliss that followed surrender? That was equally mental, just in the opposite direction.

I'd just experienced proof that consciousness could generate profound wellbeing completely independent of external circumstances. And I'd accessed this through the most basic surrender imaginable—giving up control over someone’s impression of me.

The pieces clicked with satisfying precision.

“Oh fuck,” I muttered to myself. “I think I just had an awakening.”

And from that day on, using my background in psychology as a launchpad, I devoted myself to learning everything I could about spirituality—because who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their life sipping Bintangs on a beach?

Why Your Boring Awakening Might Be Perfect

Here's the thing about spiritual awakening stories: We've mythologized them into these grand, otherworldly episodes where people commune with machine elves and download universal truths from the ether.

I love these stories, almost as much as I love synchronicity tales.

But I’d never shared my own up to now because it lacks the narrative drama we’ve come to expect from spiritual transformation.

Then I realized that was dumb and that I should tell this story—so that people don’t dismiss their quiet experiences.

Your awakening doesn't need special effects to count. Sometimes, they arrive in your living room, mid-tantrum, holding a white flag and a bottle of beer. If you’ve ever had one of those ordinary-yet-undeniable moments where everything just clicked.

That counts.

And if you haven’t had one yet, you might not need to go chasing enlightenment on a mountaintop. You might just need to let go of something you’re white-knuckling.

Who knows? Maybe your buffet breakfast is just one surrender away.1

Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic—where we normalize the quiet and deeply human parts of awakening. If this post made you feel seen, made you laugh, or just made you grateful you don’t cry over men the way I do, consider subscribing for more.

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I’ve had the partners of male friends:

• Force them to cancel plans on me;

• Sabotage informal catch-ups; and

• Trigger slow-burn ghostings.

The saying, “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine” apparently doesn’t apply if you’ve got ovaries and a sense of humor, and the reason why isn’t subtle.

They can’t handle the comparison.

I tend to say that “three’s a pattern,” and this has happened bang-on three times in the past few years—enough times that it’s become frustrating.

So, I wanted to pen my thoughts about it—mostly for my own clarity. But hey, maybe it’ll prompt your thinking too.

The Psychology of Competitive Insecurity

Admittedly, there was a time when I took satisfaction in being the opposite of whatever a "girl's girl" is.

My energy probably set out to provoke a smidge of jealousy, and these little moments of comparison were like data points that bolstered my own fragile self-image.

If someone else felt threatened, it meant I was winning.

But self-worth built on drama is a house of cards. And the irony is that any partnered guy-friend who dared such betrayal would instantly lose my respect.

Now that I’ve grown up a bit, I’d actually like to be friends with my male friends’ partners. They’re often part of the plan. I want them there, and I want to connect. But when I extend that hand and get it slapped away?

It’s not just frustrating. It’s sad.

Is it ever okay to control who your partner spends time with?

Unless your partner has betrayed your trust with a certain person before, the solution to your insecurity isn’t controlling their social life. That’s not boundaries; that’s fear in a trench coat pretending to be morality.

As one relationship therapist puts it:

Controlling your partner is probably not going to be a good recipe for a solid relationship... You want people to be happy. You want them to have rich and full lives. And if your relationship is based on limiting your partner’s experience in the world, that is going to eventually kill the relationship.1

Now, here’s where I’m going to get unpopular.

My feeling is that, among the younger generations, women are increasingly getting away with controlling behavior that would immediately be called out if the genders were reversed.

These days, it would be a blow to a woman's autonomy if her male partner dictated who she could spend time with, but I don't see this standard being applied equally both ways.

This may be, in part, because women can be incredibly tactical when it comes to this sort of control. Think conveniently timed mental health breakdowns—which is impressive in its calculation but disturbing in its execution.

The Mother Complex Connection

I hear the counterpoint: “But Nicole, a lot of men have avoidant attachment styles—of course their partners end up anxious.”

I'm not talking about those men.

I'm talking about loyal, devoted partners who are attentive and would sacrifice significantly to make their girlfriends happy.

My observation is that many of these men were raised by emotionally enmeshed mothers who looked to their sons for emotional validation rather than giving them space to develop independence.

I can sense these mothers when I meet them, and they give me the creeps.

Their sons became emotional surrogate husbands in a system of psychological programming, sometimes disguised as family closeness. Society doesn't discuss the effects of this subtle emotional enmeshment, but its consequences are playing out in this generation's partner choices.

These guys learned early on that love means tiptoeing around other people’s moods.

So when they meet a partner who’s subtly controlling? It feels familiar. It feels like home, and I’ve got sympathy for that.

But there’s a limit to my patience.

When a friend’s partner projects her insecurities onto me, it doesn’t just make things awkward—it blocks intimacy. And if a friendship can’t deepen, I’m forced to ask whether it’s worth continuing to invest.

How I'm Choosing to Respond

The men who recognize this pattern and work toward independence from unconscious maternal influence get to keep a seat at my energetic table. Those who let familiar dysfunction replay itself in their romantic choices?

I sincerely wish you good luck.

It's not that I don't care—it's that I have limited energy, and your choice of partner reveals what my investment is likely to yield.

Your partner has barred your access to external relationships and is systematically attempting to isolate you from sources of perspective and sanity.

That’s not love. That’s control.

It’s the kind of control that erodes not just your relationship but the community-based connections we’re all desperately missing.

Giving you my energy equates to pouring resources into a sinkhole that directly contradicts my values about the kind of world we ought to be building, especially if things keep going the way they are.

So I’m not going to stick around and keep offering my light. To do so would be giving you energy you cannot fully receive.

What Your Insecure Girlfriend Should Do Instead

In the past, when I met someone who made me feel insecure, I’d bitch and complain about them to others who would take my side.

Then, eventually, I grew up. And I learned that insecurity was a call to where…

• I wasn’t giving 100%;

• I wasn’t taking full responsibility for living the life I wanted to live; or

• I could stand to be inspired by someone else.

Jealousy is an invitation.

It’s the dashboard light saying, "Hey babe, you’ve stopped driving your own car." But instead of pulling over and getting your shit sorted, it’s like pulling over and knifing the tires of anyone else going somewhere.

Oh—and while we’re here, let me just say it: Your partner will find other people attractive. Just like you do.

And I can say this having been on the other side of the equation; I’ve been in an open relationship, which forces you to confront jealousy on hard mode.

Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it.

But I can confidently say that relationship solidarity is possible even in that treacherous territory. What it takes is a deep respect for what the two of you have built and a belief that the temporary high of crossing a line simply isn’t worth damaging that trust.

And if you’re still convinced the answer is to tighten the leash, I’d suggest asking yourself this incredibly confronting question instead:

Would you be so obsessed with controlling your partner’s behavior if you weren’t secretly worried about what you might do in their shoes?

If that lands with a thud in your gut, good. That’s shadow work knocking.

Open the door.

The Bottom Line

Friendship shouldn't require navigating someone else's unresolved psychological territory. When insecurity masquerades as protection, everyone loses—the controlling partner, the controlled friend, and the friendship itself.

My view? The most generous thing you can do for people locked in these dynamics is to step back and let them figure it out. Your presence won't fix their relationship problems, but your absence might force them to confront what's actually broken.

Sometimes the kindest boundary is the one that refuses to enable dysfunction, even when it's dressed up as love.

Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic—where we unpack the wounds, roast the patterns, and light a candle for the parts of you still hiding in the dark. If this post made you wince, rage, or rethink your last relationship, consider subscribing for more.

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I want to talk about a stupidly simple idea this week. It's the reason we all feel more secure when we have a home.

The reason only hit me after I ditched my perfectly curated apartment to become a "digital nomad.” The contrast has taught me something I should have seen coming:

We don't just want homes. We need them.

Because without them, we're basically inviting chaos to take up residence in our nervous systems and start trashing the place.

Let’s explore.

Meeting an Influencer Who Actually Had Her Shit Together

Since beginning my nomad travels, I’ve met a lot of people who are floating through life just fine without a fixed address. One of them was an influencer from New York who, at first glance, I assumed was all gloss and no depth.

Surprise, surprise. It turned out I was being a judgmental prick.

She was genuinely authentic. Her online persona wasn't a performance; it was just her, naturally belonging in spaces designed for people who photograph well.

She was smart, too. And she had this one line that stuck with me—stated with an unfortunate backstory about parental abuse:

I admired her courage to be vulnerable. But still, this statement seemed like the kind of spiritual platitude that sounds profound but means nothing.

I was wrong, of course. But I wouldn't understand why for months.

Why "Home" Doesn’t Always Happen Where You Live

There are lots of reasons a physical home might not feel like a safe base:

• It’s unstable or ever-changing

• It’s filled with conflict or chaos

• It was never really yours to control

Apart from a brief stint of uncertainty during my parents’ divorce, I've been fortunate. My sense of home always safely surrounded me.

That looked like:

• Having control over my environment

• Controlling the vibes that came in and out of my space

• Knowing everything had its place and purpose

But what happens when you can't have any of that? When instability means you can't wrangle your environment into feeling like home?

My sense is that you've got two choices:

1. Try and inevitably fail to create "home" in another person; or

2. Bring your home's walls from your property line right up to the edges of your skin (the influencer’s solution).

We all know what the first option looks like. It's banking everything on your partner, then falling apart when they leave. It's attachment disguised as love, when really its just outsourced security.

But what the hell is option two? Here’s how I figured it out.

My Accidental Experiment in Portable Peace

I spent years unconsciously creating an external fortress. My apartment became this masterpiece of a controlled environment—jungle vibes in one room, zen den in another.

Being a Virgo made this feel effortless. Everything had its place, every surface had its purpose, and I'd stocked my space with everything I could possibly need.

Coming home felt like exhaling into something that could hold me when I couldn't hold myself. But eventually, I began doing the internal work—meditation, yoga, getting my lifestyle sorted.

My nervous system was beginning to stabilize. Peace was starting to follow me around instead of waiting for me at home.

Soon I had two sets of walls—property walls and “skin walls”—and they were getting redundant. This was good timing too, because I was in love and needed to throw away my life to chase after a boy.

How to Maintain Movable Walls

One lovestruck morning, I mentally simulated the highs and lows of leaving everything I’d curated behind and was shocked at how easily I could do it. I didn't need the external home anymore because I'd accidentally built an internal one.

My walls had become portable.

Things didn’t work out with the boy in the end, but he served his purpose: He revealed that my hunger for adventure had outgrown my need for security.

So, I packed up, and I left.

As I started bouncing from place to place, my routines doubled in importance. Yoga, strict food habits, and alone time weren’t optional. They were the scaffolding holding up my inner home.

Without them, I’d crumble.

Many nomads figure this out the hard way. Rhythm and routine aren't just nice-to-haves when you're constantly moving—they're survival mechanisms. Your nervous system needs something to hang on to.

Your habits become your new home. But I hadn’t figured any of this out yet—I just thought I was just being disciplined.

Here’s when things came full circle and I really made the connection.

The Morning My Environment Caught Me

The other night, I broke all my rules, pretty much all at once:

• I ate sushi (not ketogenic),

• drank an entire pot of jasmine tea before bed (caffeinated, apparently—whoops),

• smoked cigarettes (plural),

• binged Sex and The City (until the early hours), and

• didn’t exercise the next morning.

But when I woke up, predictably dysregulated, something unexpected happened.

Instead of white-knuckling my way back to stability in time for my 9AM conference call, my environment caught me.

After hotel hopping for several weeks, I'd decided in the days prior to properly rent an apartment for my remaining time on the Vietnam coast.

Over those days, I'd been unknowingly creating a sense of home in this newly rented space—stocking it with fresh food, arranging my things logically, buying a scented toilet thingy, and figuring out how to get ambient music playing through the TV.

I didn’t realize what I was doing or why until it served me in this moment: I woke up, felt like shit, recalled where I was, and immediately felt the stabilizing force of "home."

My dysregulated insides calmed almost instantly—faster than they had in months—because this little apartment rose to meet me. Not because it was fancy, but because I’d brought it “under my control.”

With my indulgence, my interior walls collapsed, but like a second layer of defence, my newly built external walls saved the day. My scattered nervous system exhaled into this external stability.

That's when all of this clicked—the stabilizing force of an externalized home.

It was only when I developed my "skin walls," abandoned my apartment walls, lived with only my skin walls, then regained some apartment walls that I saw the whole cycle at work.

I’ve learned what "home" really means, what the hell that influencer was talking about, and why people cling to their homes for dear life: When you create an external home, it gives you room to let your energetic gut hang out.

And, well… most people’s energetic guts are permanently hanging out because the majority of us aren’t taught about nervous system regulation and its levers.

But when you’ve got an external home, you don't need to maintain perfect internal energetic integrity because the control, stability, and certainty around you does the heavy lifting.

It was a big “a-hah!” moment for me—and I can see all of its mechanics.

I think they’re absolutely fascinating.

Home Is Your Walled Garden

Right now, I’m grateful I’ve got an external setup that’s working for me. Six weeks in one place feels like a luxury—and, honestly, my arms were getting tired from all that yoga holding my internal house together.

But here’s the truth: Some people need the external home to get their healing done. That’s not weakness—that’s wisdom. Sometimes your body needs the extra help. Sometimes your chaos needs a container.

The next challenge, though, is learning to draw those walls in close. Each time you choose internal regulation over external dependency, you're training skills that become automatic.

You're teaching your system that safety isn't a location—it's a capacity—which is useful because the world doesn’t care how stable your apartment is when life decides to get messy. And it will get messy.

But the ability to stay steady in the middle of that mess?

Now that’s true freedom.

Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic—where we talk nervous systems, energetic sovereignty, and how to stay calm when the ground beneath you moves.

If you're working to build a home you can carry with you, subscribe for more reflections on spiritual grit and staying regulated through life’s chaos.

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I've always identified with the shaman archetype even before I knew what archetypes were or how they worked.

Shamans are a kind of guide, and anyone brave enough to get close to me quickly discovers my knack for seeing where the universe wants them to go and shoving them in that direction.1 What makes shamans different from your average life coach, however, is that they use psychiatric aids from Mother Nature's medicine chest.

The shadow side? Getting so tangled up with the tools of the trade that you forget you're supposed to put them down eventually.

I definitely did that. A lot.

Now that I've taken my life's biggest step back from all substances, it's like standing in front of a pantry full of potions and finally being able to classify each with crystal clarity.

"That one makes you brave."

"That one makes you sleepy."

"That one makes you think your houseplant is trying to talk to you."

Let me share what I've learned about nature's psycho-spiritual toolkit.

Setting the Stage: The Three Layers of Reality

Yes, we live in a world where putting things in your "real, physical" body creates "real, physical" effects. Your brain chemistry shifts, and voila—psychological changes follow.

But the most profound truths stack across physical, psychological, and energetic planes. So, when you ingest a substance, a shaman would tell you there's something happening at this energetic level too.

Regardless of whether you believe such a plane exists, sometimes it's more useful to speak at this level because it allows us to say more in fewer words.

So, I'm going to do that a lot in what follows. But in the spirit of agnosticism, don't feel you have to assume that any of my claims about energy are objectively "true."

Feel free to replace my arguments with more biochemical and/or psychological interpretations, and you'll find my conclusions still check out (I'm confident this is one area of life where the conclusions of science and spirituality gel very neatly).

So, with that out of the way, I need you to bear with me.

I need you to do something a little odd.

Please Picture Yourself as a Stack of Squiggly Lines

These squiggles are your unique library of frequencies that make up the total sum of who you authentically are.

Some of these squiggles are fully "online" and humming along nicely—you express them openly without fear or shame. Others got scared into hiding by society, your parents, or that kid who dacked you in third grade.

To squiggle through this reality peacefully and at your full potential, you need to coax as many of the offline squiggles back online as you can.

People, stories, places, food, animals, plants, and—you guessed it—substances are also stacks of squiggles; they each have their own energetic signature.

When you feel drawn to any of them, it's usually because they mirror or promise to unlock forgotten, disowned, or under-expressed squiggles in your own personal squiggle stack.

When you ingest something, it becomes part of you. You're letting its squiggles mingle very deeply with the online and offline squiggles in your own stack.2

This presents both opportunities and risks and is why smart people treat nature's medicine cabinet with reverence—as a teacher, not a plaything.

In my experience, the squiggle-altering things we can ingest tend to work in one of three ways:

1. Ego disabling

   They disable your ego, letting offline but poorly integrated squiggles come online while you (as awareness) are dazed and distracted

2. Frequency amplifying

   They increase your expression of certain squiggles when there's a frequency match between a squiggle in your stack and theirs

3. Psychedelic

   They temporarily grant perception of the energetic plane where all this squiggle-related stuff is occurring

Note that the boundaries of these categories may overlap somewhat, and some substances may fall under more than one category. For example, cannabis is both frequency amplifying—enhancing the expression of feminine qualities like ease and relaxation—and also psychedelic.

In this post, we'll just explore categories (1) and (2) because (3) is a big kettle of fish and deserves its own post.

1. How Substances Disable Your Ego

Example: Alcohol (others: benzodiazepines, opiates...)

I made friends with alcohol at 17.

At first, it was the perfect workaround. Socializing became easier, the mental hamster wheel slowed down, and it silenced my mental chatter enough to allow me to string two creative thoughts together.

Alcohol didn’t just loosen me up—it shut my ego down.

The fear, worry, and chronic self-monitoring that usually ran the show took a backseat. Suddenly, I could chat freely at parties, bang out book chapters in the evenings, and channel my late-night Socrates with my then-partner on the couch.

Alcohol gave me access to a bunch of underdeveloped squiggles—traits and abilities that had been hiding in the wings, waiting for their cue.

With my ego out cold, they got a moment in the spotlight, and some of them even turned into decent skills. But while the benefits of the booze were real—more ease, more access, more expression—they came with mounting costs.

Besides the increasing toll my nightly G&Ts were taking on my health, using substances to disable the ego also disables its ability to keep unintegrated parts of you in check.

The exiled bits—the basement-dwellers of your psyche—get curious.

And when the inner bouncers are drunk off duty, these parts have a way of sneaking into the VIP section.

When the Ego Is Offline, the Archetypes Come Out to Play

Occasionally, my tipsy bookish pastimes would be tossed out and replaced by a bold, sensual, chaotic energy that, frankly, surprised me as much as anyone else.

How else do you explain flirting with a taxi driver so hard that you forget to pay him? Or making out with your guy-friend's girlfriend to stamp yourself in his memory by proxy?

I wasn’t trying to act out. It just happened.

You know, a few times.

Like some deeply repressed siren archetype had hijacked the wheel and was gleefully running red lights. And every time, I’d wake up, hungover and mildly horrified, replaying my antics with a mix of shame and strange admiration.

“Why aren't I more like that without the ethanol possession?” I’d wonder.

Truth is, I probably could be—but alcohol made it easy. Too easy. It fast-tracked self-expression but also short-circuited integration—the spiritual equivalent of giving a toddler the car keys.

The consequences were rarely catastrophic, but they were clues. Clues that ego suppression without awareness doesn’t make you more authentic but rather unpredictable.

Eventually, alcohol stopped being a bridge to my bolder self and became a blockade. The longer I leaned on it, the more it anchored me in low-vibe territory. Lust without discernment started doing damage, and the shadow doesn’t care if it ruins your night or someone else’s.

It just wants airtime.

So while alcohol helped me override fear and crack open new parts of myself, it also showed me what happens when you skip the hard work of conscious integration.

You get possessed by your own potential—and not always in a good way.

2. How Substances Amplify Your Frequencies

Examples: Cannabis, coffee (others: see masculine and feminine lists below.)

I may as well torpedo my professional reputation completely here.

Alcohol served me faithfully until my mid twenties, after which I graduated to greener pastures, discovering the Devil's lettuce.

Thank god I didn't find it earlier because if you're under 25 and smoke it regularly, it messes with brain development in ways that can derail your life—I’ve seen the consequences and am concerned they’re not being talked about enough.3

Worse yet, hospital admissions for psychosis are through the roof in places where weed is commercialized.4 This stuff is being promoted as "safe" medicine now, even though it comes with a bunch of risks.

One of these is that if you're not good at taking control of your life, it risks trapping you in cycles of use instead of necessary action. But the very thing that makes it trapping is also what makes it so useful.

When Feminine Plants Seduce You Into Stillness

Substances in this second category can be divided into the camps of masculine vs. feminine. They interact with our own masculine and feminine tendencies in our squiggle stacks to either bring them online or amplify them.

When I refer to "masculine" and "feminine," I'm not talking about gender roles here. Instead, think yin and yang.

Masculine expressions are activating, energizing, and directive—they push outward, encourage movement, and sharpen your focus. Examples of masculine substances include:

• Coffee

• Tobacco

• Rhodiola

• Maca

• Yerba mate

• Guarana

Feminine expressions are receptive, relaxing, and inward—they invite stillness, surrender, and emotional depth. Examples of feminine substances include:

• Cannabis

• Cacao

• Kava

• Blue lotus

• Mugwort

• Chamomile

Cannabis is a powerfully feminine plant. It invites you inward and says, "sit with this" instead of "go do that." This passivity cannabis induces can either trap you in dissatisfaction or give you much-needed rest.

Context is everything.

With proper set and setting, decent mindfulness, and energetic grounding5, you can ideally sidestep its anxious and disorienting effects and access its feminine, relaxing gifts instead.

This profound relaxation made me fall in love with the leaf instantly and—once I peeled myself off the couch—sparked an obsessive quest to access that depth of relaxation naturally because I knew it had to be possible.

The trouble was, I initially went looking in the wrong places.

Steeped in the plant’s feminine allure, I began daydreaming that a man would bring me the life of ease I craved, rather than creating that life for myself.

Over time, these fantasies became increasingly bizarre and improbable: I became convinced a man twice my age on the other side of the globe would see my brilliance and leave his wife to rescue me from my mundane life.

Yeah. Yikes.

Substances (and people, for that matter) only "loan" us their frequency so we can learn to cultivate it ourselves in our own squiggle stack. Think of them as airlifting you up the experiential mountain so you can plant a flag, fly back down, then hike to that waypoint on your own.

Never make the mistake of positioning substances (or people) as the permanent means to some desired end. To do so is a trap and basically the definition of addiction (or obsession).6

Anyway, for someone who’d spent five years meditating, I figured I’d earned a bit of inner stillness by now. But apparently, I’d been caffeinating it out of reach.

It turned out my love for the lettuce was largely a countermeasure.

It was balancing out the effects of my morning coffee—a masculine substance that had powered me through years of achievement but quietly wrecked my system’s ability to relax.

How did I know it was coffee's fault?

Because days after quitting it, I felt so relaxed it was as if I'd smoked a joint. The weed had been patching an imbalance I didn’t know the coffee had created.

Once I made the connection, I ditched both, sparking my current war on coffee—which you can read more about in last week's post:

The real takeaway?

Balance isn’t just a lifestyle tip—it’s key to lasting peace. The substances you reach for without thinking are often the ones worth questioning most. So before you light it, sip it, or smoke it, ask yourself: Am I using this as a tool—or letting it use me?

The Case for Conscious Use

Substances aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re amplifiers, disrupters, teachers, and tricksters—all rolled into one. Whether they become your ally or your downfall depends on how consciously you use them.

You can borrow a state, sure. But if you mistake the loan for ownership, you’ll stay broke. That’s why the goal is always integration. To learn what each substance unlocks—and then find a sober, grounded way to access that frequency yourself.

Because if you can only feel calm, bold, creative, or free with a substance in your system, then you’re not free. You’re just outsourcing your squiggles.

Use the tools. Thank them too. But don’t let them run the show.

Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic. If you’ve ever treated a latte like a spiritual crutch or made out with someone’s energy field by accident, you’re in the right place. Subscribe for more irreverent breakdowns of your psycho-spiritual habits and enjoy new posts every Friday, straight to your inbox.

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I started drinking coffee at 12 years old.

Translation: My developing brain became best friends with a powerful stimulant before I even knew what its default state of functioning was.

Because let's call coffee what it is—a drug.

A socially acceptable, widely celebrated, aggressively marketed drug. And just because your grandmother drinks it every morning, doesn't mean it's healthy.

Still, it became my academic secret weapon. It gave me a competitive edge through a relentless career of study—first powering me through exams, then helping me churn out research papers.

It was a relationship that worked beautifully. Until it didn’t.

Now, I've realized my entire life has been shaped by its influence in ways I'm needing to untangle without letting my strung-out brain and professional obligations crumple into a heap.

I'm in the middle of a messy but well-overdue breakup with the brown stuff. And like any breakup, it's coming with a mix of fresh possibilities and the sharp sting of letting go.

Here's how it all started.

The Mysterious Case of Morning Panic

I'd taken every possible step to maximize my peace.

I quit my job. Gave myself permission to rest. Started getting my toenails painted. But no matter what I did, I kept waking up anxious.

The anxiety was in my body, not my head. It would hit me before I'd even opened my eyes and let my first thought of the day enter my mind. It made no logical sense, and it was becoming maddening.

So, eventually, I did what I always do when I get stuck in life: I asked the universe to show me what I was missing.

Two days later, I got violently sick.

Whether it was food poisoning or a bug, my body was in full evacuation mode. My stomach was too sensitive to drink much of anything—let alone coffee—for about five days.

The twist?

Somewhere in the middle of that horrible, dehydrated, cold-tile-on-the-bathroom-floor experience, I noticed something I didn't expect.

Peace. Deep, deep peace.

It turned out that just one cup of coffee a day had been silently stoking my nervous system like a fire poker for years. And when I removed it—even unintentionally—the difference was undeniable.

I was shivering, sweaty, and down to my last two electrolytes. But I wasn’t anxious.

And that was wild to me.

My Daily Coffee Hangover

My morning routine was predictable:

1. Wake up anxious

2. Project that anxiety onto my to-do list

3. Drink a coffee to give me the brain power to defeat that to-do list

4. Regain a sense of control

5. Repeat

The cruel irony? I was drinking coffee to help me function through anxiety that was primarily caused by... yesterday's coffee. It was an anxiety hangover that greeted me each morning before my first conscious thought.

My nervous system has been perpetually activated, like an engine running hot with no cooldown period. The baseline of my existence had become a low-grade emergency state that felt completely normal.

And while it's a relief to have figured this out, giving up the daily brew hasn't been entirely easy because it's forcing me to let go of things I didn’t even realize I was clinging to.

Who Even Am I Without This Drug?

Stopping coffee triggered an ego death I wasn't prepared for.

Within days, my worst professional nightmare unfolded: I was on a client call, staring down a complex problem that, under normal circumstances, should have been well within my skillset.

But for the first time, my brain flatlined.

As I looked at the project—the one I'd helped design—it felt alien, like someone else entirely had built it. Someone smarter. Someone caffeinated.

Foggy-brained and slumped in my chair, I shrugged. "I don't know how to fix this," I said. "My brain doesn’t have the answer." And I wanted to add, "It barely knows what it’s looking at right now."

That moment of professional helplessness was sobering.

It made me confront a brutal truth: I’d been outsourcing my cognitive clarity to caffeine for years. My ability to perform—hell, my entire professional identity—was tangled up in a stimulant I thought I had under control.

Now, without it, I feel like a toddler relearning how my mind works. What it's capable of. What it needs. It's humbling and a little terrifying. But it’s also revealing something new.

It turns out, the real me is a lot more "chill" than I ever realized.

She loves to relax. She trusts slow mornings and deep exhales. She’s been buried under espresso shots and urgency for far too long. And now? She’s finally stretching out her limbs.

The Hidden Connection Between Coffee and Feminine Energy

Here's something they don't tell you at Starbucks: Coffee is not a feminine plant.

Any experienced shaman will tell you that plants have energetic qualities. Cannabis and ayahuasca carry feminine energies—they invite introspection, receptivity, and circular thinking. They encourage you to spiral inward and explore. Cannabis, in particular, also brings about the feminine states of rest and relaxation.

Masculine plants, like coffee and tobacco, direct energy like an arrow—linear, focused, achievement-oriented. They propel you forward with intensity and purpose.

For all my research into plant wisdom, I completely missed how I was sabotaging my own goals. By routinely ingesting a masculine substance every morning without thinking about it, I was creating daily obstacles to accessing my feminine energy.

What does this mean practically?

Since quitting coffee, I'm quickly discovering a depth of relaxation I knew existed but always felt beyond my reach—like buried treasure I've been seeking out for years.

But now, I've finally found it.

My body is remembering how to truly rest. Not the caffeine-crash collapse, but genuine, restorative stillness. The only appropriate words to describe it are words like “heaven” or possibly “post-orgasm bliss.”

So, yeah. The tradeoff in mental sharpness has been 100% worth it.

The Challenge: Quit Coffee, Meet Yourself

When coffee becomes your daily companion for productivity, questioning its presence feels unnecessary. Because what's one cup going to do? Everyone has their morning ritual, right?

But for me, it was a very big deal. Which is why it's important to question everything about your lifestyle when you're trying to "do the work" and improve your mental health.

If you've been drinking coffee for years and struggle with:

• Persistent anxiety that seems to have no clear cause;

• An inability to fully relax during downtime;

• Digestive issues that come and go mysteriously; or,

• Feeling wired but tired most days.

Try quitting for just five days. I felt a dramatic difference within that timeframe.

The first three days might be rough (headaches, fatigue, irritability), but push through. What awaits on the other side might surprise you—it might be the real you, the version that exists beneath the stimulant haze.

Silence the Stimulant, Hear Yourself Again

The most valuable discovery wasn't just about what coffee was doing to me, but what it was preventing me from experiencing. My natural energy patterns, my authentic thought processes, my body's true signals—all had been masked by the constant stimulation.

Coffee had become the background music I'd forgotten was playing. Only in the silence of its absence could I hear myself clearly again. So question your habits, especially the ones that seem too ordinary to question.

Your wellbeing might just depend on it.

Thanks for reading. If this post made you spit out your coffee—in laughter, shock, or suspicion—it did its job. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic for more psycho-spiritual deep dives, caffeine comedowns, and consciousness upgrades.

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Here’s the thesis statement for this week: You don’t get to complain that your life isn’t what you want if you’re doing nothing to change it.

Let’s start there. No sugar-coating. No comforting caveats.

If you can’t point to one thing you did today to move your life in the direction of something more meaningful, then sorry. You’re not stuck. You're just standing still.

Allow me to explain why.

Why We Give Our Power Away

We love to blame our circumstances. We defer to the energy-draining parts of life that keep us from dedicating time to the things that might actually change it.

• “I’m too exhausted after work.”

• “The life I want isn’t realistic.”

• “I don’t have the resources to start yet.”

In making these excuses, we cede our power. We act like we’re waiting for the universe to give us permission, but here’s the truth: The universe already gave you permission.

It did it the moment you imagined something better.

Because if you can picture a version of your life where you’re doing the thing—whatever it is—then that version of you and your life already exists. Your job is to start behaving like someone who’s heading there.

You don’t need to know the full “how.” You just need to start showing up like someone who’s on the way.

You want to write a novel? Start penning a few words each day. You want to become an artist? Start making ugly art. You want to build something? Start stacking the bricks, one by one.

The 3 False Beliefs That Keep You Stuck

You’ve heard all this before. But still, the excuses persist.

In my experience, it’s because you’re carrying at least one of three misconceptions about getting the life you desire.

1. You believe you don’t have the time, energy, or resources

People often think they need the fanciest tools, the clearest schedule, or the most inspiring setup to start pursuing something meaningful. But if you look at the lives of the greatest creatives, inventors, or even small-business owners, that belief falls apart.

Most of them began with very little—writing books between night shifts, sketching on napkins during lunch breaks, or learning to code in noisy kitchens after the kids had gone to sleep.

Waiting for ideal conditions is often a disguised form of procrastination. If you’re genuinely passionate, you will find a way to begin—even if it means waking up earlier, using second-hand materials, or building momentum in five-minute pockets of time.

Because passion is a magical energy reserve. It generates its own momentum.1

So if you keep saying you don’t have the time or energy, maybe it’s worth asking whether the desire is strong enough to begin with.

2. You believe you want the life, but really you just want the end result

This might sting, but it’s worth saying plainly.

If you’re still using the excuse that you don’t have time or resources, then you probably don’t want the thing as badly as you claim. Because if you did, you’d be doing it already—even in the margins of your life.

A lot of people confuse desire with devotion. They say they want to be a writer, an artist, an entrepreneur, or whatever—but what they really want is the lifestyle that comes after someone else has already done the hard work.

The recognition. The income. The sense of achievement.

But the truth is, the end result is never going to be as sweet as you think it is, and 99% of your time will be spent slogging your way there. If you’re not enjoying that slog—if you don’t feel a pulse of something real while you’re doing the thing—you’re not going to last.

So maybe it’s time to be honest. Maybe you’ve been chasing the wrong goal. Maybe you’ve been discarding the right ones—ones you actually enjoy—because you told yourself they weren’t monetizable or practical enough.

But practicality is secondary. Simply pick something you like doing for the sake of it.

Start doing it more, even if it doesn't make sense practically, because here’s the twist: Spending time on this activity will be the most direct path to happiness—even though it may not look like it from the outside.

3. You believe following your passion won’t lead anywhere—but it will

People underestimate how powerful it is to spend time doing something they genuinely love. When you’re fully immersed in something expressive, skill-developing, or creative, even if no one sees it, even if no one pays you for it, something shifts.

In energetic terms, this is called “aligning with your frequency.”

When you’re in that flow state—so immersed that you forget time—you enter a different energetic reality. You start radiating satisfaction, joy, and gratitude. These are all high frequencies that make you magnetic, drawing your desired reality to you.2

This doesn’t mean you’ll be instantly rewarded with book deals or art shows or offers from your dream clients. It means the invisible energetic structures of your life begin to realign. You start noticing new opportunities. You attract different kinds of people.

Your own sense of identity expands to include the version of you you’ve always wanted to become.

When you feel these positive emotions in the present—ones inevitably characteristic of the future you’re aiming for—you’ll never actually need to look for your future because…

• you’ll already be happy doing what you love, and;

• that happiness will draw in more opportunities to continue doing what you love so you can continue being happy in a self-perpetuating cycle.

This is the paradoxical Law of Attraction in a nutshell.3

In summary: When you stop doing the thing to get somewhere and start doing it because it feels good to do, you get where you wanted to go faster and by means you could never have predicted.

So stop waiting for the evidence that you’re good enough or ready enough. Because the evidence comes after you start, not before.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Doing something creative, expressive, or skill-developing—even for a few minutes a day—isn’t just play. It’s protection. It’s the antidote to victimhood.

Because when you can see your progress—when you can trace your own growth—it builds the kind of inner proof no circumstance can take away.

So even if everything else in your life feels out of your control, at least you’ll know you’re moving. You’ll know that every tiny action is part of the compound interest of becoming; better to be five pages into a book you’re writing than five years into a job you hate with nothing to show for it but stress and a countdown to your next holiday.

So ask yourself: What would I be doing with my time if I wasn’t trying to prove anything? What simply feels good to do?

And am I making any room for that version of me to breathe? Because if not, it’s time.

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."

—Arthur Ashe

Thanks for being here. If this post hit something true for you, consider subscribing for more reflections on growth, alignment, and what it takes to live a life you don’t want to escape from—there’ll be plenty more to come.

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When I was in first-year university, sitting the Intro to Communications exam, I was asked to respond to a deceptively simple statement: Life imitates art.

We hadn’t studied it. There were no readings, no lectures. The task was less about content and more about coherence—could we string together a vaguely convincing argument? Could we survive an arts degree?

I remember blinking at the prompt, completely lost. I didn’t know life could imitate art. Beyond the obvious: people buying clothes they saw on a celebrity and parroting slang they heard from rappers.

So I wrote something about that—media influence, unconscious mimicry, basic psychology stuff. Not terrible for a freshman, but about as deep as a puddle compared to the ocean of meaning beneath the surface.

Here’s what I think about this statement today.

Beyond Consumer Psychology

Yes, life imitates art in the ways we all sort of know. Trends. Fashion. What we find cool. But it goes deeper than influencers peddling beauty products on Instagram.

Way deeper.

Art captures us emotionally. Stories stay with us. Symbols lodge somewhere in the psyche and start shaping things. What truly captivates us tends to manifest in our lives whether we recognize it or not because the ideas, images, and narratives that stick with us aren’t just influential—they’re instructive.

And I mean this literally.

They cue something ancient in us. They animate us. What we obsess over often maps onto something unresolved—or aspirational—within us. It’s not just that your favorite movie scene reminds you of your life.

It’s that your life might be arranging itself according to that scene.

As an example, consider the music you’ve been drawn to at different times in your life. Then, think about the events that came to pass shortly after, and you might notice your tastes were a prelude, a warning, or a prophecy.

Spot enough of these patterns, and you’ll soon stop calling them coincidences and start calling them synchronicities—something I go into more detail about here:

Eventually, you start to realize the motifs in art and culture are the only available ingredients for scripting a life, and you are its director.

Once you realize that, the game gets interesting.

Welcome to the Role of Co-Creator

At the moment of conscious recognition—when you realize you’re not just passively experiencing your life but actively co-creating it—you’re faced with an interesting dilemma: from where will you draw inspiration for this conscious self-authorship?

The answer, somewhat obviously in retrospect, is that you have nowhere to turn except the symbolic language you’ve absorbed through art and culture. There simply isn’t an alternative source material. We’re all essentially remixing cultural references into personal narratives, like DJs sampling from the collective unconscious.

You still don’t get control over everything. But you do get intentional with the symbols you surround yourself with. The stories you tell. The moods you let linger.

Scripting Some Excitement

Not following me? Here’s an example.

I love a good thriller.

Consequently, I’ve realized a part of me likes scripting suspense into my own life—dragging things out, heightening tension, dangling plot twists. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in my work, friendships, or love life.

Risk, loss, and unpredictability in pursuit of a potentially large payoff all form part of this equation. Because without suspense, life just feels dull—and I like my wins to be hard earned.

Could a simple look at your favorite genre afford you a similar insight too?

Moving Forward: Conscious Narrative Design

That eighteen-year-old kid writing her exam? She didn’t know she was quietly authoring her reality. That girl just wanted to finish her essay and hit the pub.

But I like this new version of me more—the one who sees the story while living it.

For those who recognize this pattern, the question becomes not whether life imitates art, but which art you’ll allow your life to imitate. What stories resonate? Which characters inspire? What themes feel worth exploring?

Making this process conscious doesn’t diminish its mystery—it simply allows for more intentional participation. The experimenter and the experiment continue their peculiar dance, simultaneously separate and inseparable, observer and observed.

So if you’re not already, I invite you to ask yourself: How will your next chapter unfold?

Thanks for reading. If this reflection helped you see your own story a little more clearly, consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more essays on self-awareness, cultural symbolism, and how to become the main character without losing the plot.

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Picture modern masculinity as a ship navigating without a compass.

Young men—the same ones who swung dramatically toward Trump in 2024—find themselves adrift in a sea of changing expectations, with their traditional anchors of identity cut loose and floating away on the cultural tide.1

They’re drifting. Aimless. Quietly collapsing.

Men are falling behind in education, disconnecting from social institutions, and retreating into digital corners of validation.23 Meanwhile, we women stand on the shoreline, arms crossed, muttering about how they should have packed a better map.

I’m about to commit the cardinal sin of internet discourse—suggesting that women might have some responsibility in this equation.

The Algorithm of Romantic Misdirection

Here’s the inconvenient truth: We’re busy blocking, ghosting, and lamenting the state of modern men while all simultaneously aiming our romantic attention at the same toxic sliver of the male population.

Dating apps are a strange economy where badly behaved men become artificially scarce resources. The men who’ve received the most positive reinforcement for their behavior are precisely the ones who’ve been taught they don’t need to evolve it.

It’s the 4% of men at the top—the ones we’re all chasing until we wise up to their game—that are casting a long shadow over the rest—the quiet majority that never even got the chance to disappoint us in the first place.4

Why Women Are Checking Out

Hurt and heartbroken, the cultural current then pushes us toward a comfortable narrative: We don't need them.

We’re boss bitches, independent women, self-sufficient queens.

Ask any woman subscribing to this philosophy, and she’ll likely unfold a personal history of male-inflicted wounds—fathers who vanished, boyfriends who betrayed, bosses who belittled.

These wounds are real. Valid. Deserving of acknowledgment.

That pain, combined with economic freedom and shifting gender norms, has given women more options. And that’s a good thing. But when too many of us opt out of connection altogether, everything starts to unravel.

What Most Women Really Want

Here’s where I’ll really lose friends:

What if our collective response—this mass retreat into feminine independence—isn’t actually healing anything? What if it's just calcifying our pain into something that looks suspiciously like empowerment?

Because here’s what I believe: Most women don’t want a man they can dominate.

We want men we can respect. And if we’re not finding them? That’s not a reason to turn our backs on men entirely. It’s a call to help them rise.

Women excel at emotional alchemy—transforming raw pain into processed wisdom. We dive into therapy, spiritual practice, and self-help with remarkable dedication. We “do the work.” But what's the point of all this inner excavation if we’re using it to build higher walls?

The irony will arrive with a soft knock at the door.

Your emotionally constipated brother will ask what therapist you see. Your dating app match will admit he doesn’t know how to process grief. Your father, approaching retirement, will wonder aloud about his purpose.

These aren’t requests for us to act as unpaid therapists or emotional rehabilitation centers. They’re invitations to witness something rare—men reaching across the divide.

I’m not suggesting martyrdom. I’m suggesting something more radical: Seeing men as complex humans worthy of the same nuanced understanding we demand for ourselves.

Disney Dreams and Unglamorous Groundwork

The Disney-fied romantic fantasies we’ve nursed since childhood?

They will require this unglamorous groundwork—not the sweeping-off-feet variety, but the showing-up-consistently kind. The kind where we extend the same compassion to struggling men that we readily offer our female friends.

Because what’s the alternative?

Men and women continuing to orbit each other with increasing suspicion, retreating further into gender-segregated corners of mutual incomprehension? That’s certainly one trajectory—one that feeds podcasters and content creators handsomely, but leaves actual humans increasingly isolated.

Understanding that when we help the men in our immediate circles navigate emotional terrain, we’re not just doing it for them—we’re doing it for every woman they’ll encounter afterward.

So help your friend. Help your father. Help your brother. Knowing that in doing so, you’re helping another woman out there—someone who’s hoping that one day, this man will have the capacity to love, to contain, to meet her with depth.

We’re all just walking each other home, as Ram Dass put it. And sometimes that means traversing uncomfortable terrain together, helping each other over the rough patches without keeping score of who stumbled more.

Thanks for reading. If this piece helped shift your perspective—even slightly—consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more reflections on healing, culture, and the shared work of becoming something better—together.

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Ever noticed how your clueless spiritual friend lives perpetually on the edge of disaster, yet somehow always lands butter-side up?

Each time they fail the basic rules of adulthood, the universe hands them a miracle. And here you are—not sure whether they’re delusional, divinely protected, or just damn good at surrender.

Let’s talk about that friend.

The Mystifying Phenomenon of Cosmic Bailouts

There they go again.

It’s your spiritually-inclined friend—floating through life like a butterfly on muscle relaxants. Their car sounds like a washing machine filled with silverware. They’re selling handmade dreamcatchers on Instagram.

Their phone’s been dead three days.

Yet—when they resurface—you inevitably learn about their luck. They “manifest” a tax refund hours before eviction, are bumped to first class after nearly missing a flight, and get offered a job after wandering into the wrong yoga class.

All of this they’ll dismiss with a cosmic explanation, recounting their life’s chaos between sips of chlorophyll water. And as each outrageous tale somehow finds its resolution, you wonder how your friend has survived this long—how they’re not panhandling on a corner or lost in the Peruvian desert.

You ask yourself: How the hell do they keep pulling this off?

The Sacred Bumbler: A Field Guide

This isn't a one-off phenomenon. This is your friend’s entire life strategy. A repeating cycle that looks like this:

1. Careen toward obvious danger

2. Remain bizarrely untroubled until the moment of catastrophe

3. Get rescued at the last moment by improbable coincidence

4. Claim this validates their spiritual framework

5. Repeat

This friend’s life is a parade of near-misses turned soft landings. A messy symphony of missed alarms, impulsive leaps, and just-in-time recoveries. It’s enough to make a Type-A doubt the very concept of cause and effect.

While you're stress-sweating over your five-year plan, they're burning sage in their underwear, confident the universe will handle their student loan payments.

The infuriating part? It keeps working.

The Accidental Wisdom of Incompetence

At first glance, they seem like the last person you'd model your life after. But in truth: Your friend isn't just lucky—they're accidentally tapped into something profound.

After crashing into enough walls and finding enough trapdoors that led to better rooms, they've preserved something the rest of us traded long ago for mortgages and career advancement: genuine faith in cosmic benevolence.

Not the kind that comes from reading the right books or attending the right retreats, but the battle-tested variety that emerges when you've been saved from your own incompetence so many times you can no longer deny the pattern.

While the rest of us are planning our therapeutic breakthroughs, tracking our macros, and reviewing our productivity metrics, this friend is charging their crystals on the dashboard of a car they forgot to register.

They don't manifest intentionally. They manifest by accident.

Their intelligence was never the driver. But their sincerity? Off the charts.

Because in their unwavering emotional honesty, they’ve stumbled into a deeper kind of alignment. One that doesn’t require constant optimization, but a willingness to surrender and let go.

If that idea feels a little slippery, I unpack it more fully here:

Let Them Inspire You (No, Seriously)

Your friend—the one who responds to overdraft notices with affirmations rather than budget adjustments? Let that holy mess be your guide.

Their superpower is an emotional intelligence so pure it borders on accidental genius. They feel their way through life instead of thinking through it, registering subtle signals the rest of us override with logic.

It’s about time we learned from that friend.

Stop strategizing your self-healing journey. Stop weighing your almonds. Stop spreadsheeting your soul.

Start feeling instead.

There's intelligence in emotion that calculations can't capture, and there's a guidance system built into your heart that your brain keeps trying to override.

Surrender is the intelligence. Because in relaxing your grip, you make space for something wiser to take the wheel.

It might feel like you're crashing. But hey—look at your friend.

They’re already soaring.

Thanks for reading. If this made you smile or helped you loosen your grip a little, consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more reflections on growth, trust, and getting somewhere good by doing a little less—there’ll be plenty more to come.

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If you’re someone who hesitates to take action—who freezes at the thought of making a move—this post isn’t for you. This one’s for my fellow control freaks. The Type A personalities who see backing down as spiritual treason.

That’s right. We’re talking about surrender.

If you want to get anywhere in life, you’ll soon discover there are moments where you need to let go to move forward. It feels counterintuitive, like deliberately stepping off a cliff. But when you know these moments are coming, tapping into to the bigger picture of their necessity can make them a little easier to stomach.

As a maniacal control freak, my hope is that this summary of everything I’ve learned on this topic—through both study, and experience—will help you recognize and accept life’s moments of surrender with less fear and more grace.

Let’s start with the basics…

What is Surrender?

Surrender isn’t giving up. It’s more like releasing your grip on life’s steering wheel when you’ve already done all the driving you can do.

It’s taking control right up to the edge of usefulness, then backing away—right at the moment when more control becomes counterproductive—to see what your energy investment yields.

Think of gardening. You plant seeds, water them, whisper encouragements, perhaps play Mozart for them. But at some point, more water drowns them. More attention suffocates them. The garden needs space to do its garden thing.

Surrender is when “doing” hits its limit and “not-doing” becomes the advanced move.

This need to surrender appears systematically everywhere in life. It’s…

• launching a creation to the world, then waiting in excruciating silence;

• emotionally letting go of people who want to be let go;

• waiting on medical test results for a potentially serious condition;

• quitting a soulless job without a plan;

• expressing your feelings for someone, not knowing whether they’re reciprocated;

• asking for a raise, then not replaying the conversation in your head while your boss deliberates;

• admitting you need help after hitting rock bottom.

In each scenario, you’ve handed over your fate to forces beyond your control or welcomed a void into your life, which is often scary and painful.

This fear and pain is proportional to how tightly your ego is clinging to a particular outcome. And that grip tightens in direct response to how scared you are of not getting what you want or letting go of control.

Why Surrender is Hard

When we really want something, “not-doing” violates everything we’ve been programmed to believe about success.

It starts when we become convinced that we need so-and-so person, opportunity, or outcome to be happy. Having identified what we want, we’ve been taught to then pounce on it like a leopard, drag it under our control, and display it proudly on our achievement shelf.

But this approach fights against life’s natural current. It causes energy to stagnate or pressurize until something inevitably explodes.

We cling to control in this way because we get too wedded to our meticulously crafted life blueprints. The result is that deviations from these plans spin us into mental and emotional crisis.

But notice how life sometimes drops unexpected gifts in your path—things that completely rewrite your plans? A random conversation that leads to your dream job. A new connection that becomes essential. A surprise opportunity that makes your previous goals look like amateur hour.

We underestimate how often opportunity knocks—mostly because we’re too busy assuming the door’s going to stay shut. I recently heard someone say: “There are seats for you at tables you don't even know exist yet,” which perfectly captures this point.

But, in a classic case of our survival mechanisms running amok, our negativity bias makes us hoard every good thing like apocalypse preppers, terrified that nothing good will ever come again.1

Consequently, surrender often means releasing what seems like your only shot at happiness and trusting there’s more waiting beyond your current field of vision. It’s overcoming the frightening conviction that good things are limited resources that must be immediately secured.

How 3 Wisdom Traditions Think About Surrender

Surrender appears across many different philosophical traditions. It’s clearly a key aspect of human existence that we keep rediscovering in slightly different packaging.

Let’s examine three frameworks, moving from the commonly known to the increasingly weird and witchy.

1. The Law of Detachment

A modern self-help concept, popularized by Deepak Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, the Law of Detachment states:

To manifest what you desire, you must release your attachment to how and when it comes.2

In other words, set your intention clearly—but then let go of the need to control the outcome. When you cling too tightly, you’re signaling fear, doubt, or lack to the universe. Detachment means trusting that what is meant for you will arrive in divine timing and that your wellbeing isn’t dependent on any one outcome.

Briefly put:

• Set the arrow (your intention),

• Release the bowstring (take aligned action),

• Trust the flight (detach from outcome),

• Stay open to whatever form your highest good takes.

This analogy makes clear that surrender isn’t about giving up. It’s about surrendering your grip so that energy can flow, rather than get stuck in fear.

Here’s another quote worth tattooing somewhere visible:

“If not this, then something better. And if not now, then at a better time.”

If you could somehow download this belief directly into your operating system, you’d have mastered surrender and be able to relax much more easily.

Now, let’s get biblical.

2. The Story of Abraham and Isaac

Moving from modern spirituality to ancient scripture, we find perhaps the most dramatic illustration of surrender in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

Abraham, after decades of waiting for a son, is finally blessed with Isaac. Then comes the ultimate test: God asks Abraham to sacrifice this long-awaited child—the fulfilment of his deepest desire and divine promise.

Despite every paternal instinct screaming against it, Abraham prepares to surrender his son. He takes Isaac to the mountain, builds an altar, and raises the knife—only to be stopped at the last moment by divine intervention.

The message isn’t about child sacrifice (thankfully). It’s a symbolic story about something deeper: The willingness to surrender even your most precious attachment when called to do so. It’s letting go of what you believe you cannot live without and trusting that something meaningful exists beyond your current understanding.

Again, this story is pointing to our biased vision—our inability to detect surprises around the corner—and the fact that losing what we love might actually widen our view, not ruin it.

3. Gurdjieff’s Enneagram

Now for something truly esoteric.

The Enneagram, as taught by mystic G.I. Gurdjieff (not the personality typing system), goes a step beyond the other frameworks by telling you exactly when to surrender. The timing becomes obvious based on the texture of your experience.

Picture a nine-pointed star enclosed in a circle.

Each point marks a stage in any process, and one full clockwise loop takes you from start to finish—and back to the start again.

The triangle inside it? That’s where the magic is. Literally.

Each line—white, black, and red—represents an energetic phase in any meaningful pursuit, whether you’re scaling a company, navigating a relationship, or just trying to make a soufflé that doesn’t implode.

Once you learn this pattern, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. Like a cosmic instruction manual hiding in plain sight.

The White Line

The white line represents creation and accumulation. It’s that honeymoon phase of a process where more effort equals more results. It’s where enthusiasm propels you forward and obstacles feel like amusing puzzles rather than existential threats.

This is where we Type A personalities feel most at home, believing our sheer force of will can bend reality to our specifications.

The Black Line

The black line marks the point where you slam face-first into your fears and insecurities. The key here isn’t avoidance but full immersion—diving headlong into whatever terrifies you about your pursuit.

Here’s a little something to help with that:

If fear appears in your path, it’s there for a reason—it’s an invitation to confront it and level up into a new version of yourself. The alternative is that all that beautiful effort from the first phase simply evaporates, like morning dew under a blowtorch.

The Red Line

But then—always, inevitably—we encounter the red line.

The red line signals the point of necessary sacrifice, where progress only happens through surrender. When you hit the red line, you'll notice:

• something that once worked is no longer working;

• more effort or attempts at control produce exponentially diminishing returns;

• an intuition that it’s time to release something; or

• a need to test your efforts against reality.

This is when it’s time to let go and see whether the universe catches you or lets you fall. Either outcome contains information you desperately need.

The brilliance of this model is that it signals exactly when surrender becomes necessary based on the experience you’re having. In this way, intelligence becomes less about brain power, but rather about knowing where you are in a process.

Surrender With a Smile

Surrender happens when you truly release your conviction that things must unfold according to your specifications for you to be happy. It’s leaving room for the universe to surprise you with something you couldn’t have imagined.

It’s stepping into uncertainty while trusting that whatever happens next serves a larger pattern that works in your favor, even when the immediate evidence seems contradictory.

Surrender isn’t an excuse for passivity or laziness—far from it.

It’s about developing the wisdom to recognize when further effort no longer serves and when letting go becomes the most powerful action available. It’s the paradoxical truth that to have, we must first be willing to release.

Because it’s in that space of emptiness that we make room for what truly belongs in our lives to find its way home.

Thanks for reading. If you’re learning how to loosen your grip and trust the process, I hope this post gave you something useful to hold onto (and eventually, let go of). And if it did? Consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more reflections on growth, process, and finding peace in the unknown.

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