Venture Beyond

The earthquake hit on a Wednesday afternoon. I found out the way most people find out about something this large — messages arriving from everywhere, all at once, overlapping. I read them standing still. I was already in my day, already fully awake, and then suddenly I was in something else entirely, something not real, not possible.

I want to be honest about what the days that followed looked like, because I think honesty is the point. Wednesday night I collapsed into it — into Instagram, into X, into the relentless scroll. I was in shock, still I cried hard, but not in a straight line. That's what I want to share, because I think it matters more than the grief itself: none of this moved in a straight line.

In the days that followed — really, within the same minutes — I could be watching footage of government teams blocking…

There’s something I’ve been sitting with for many years now — something that began to take shape after my divorce, and deepened through the loss of another very meaningful relationship.

No one really teaches us how to be in a relationship. We’re taught how to succeed, how to perform, how to navigate the external world. But when it comes to love, intimacy, and building a life with another person — most of us are left to figure it out as we go.

That was certainly true for me. I got married completely in love. We built a family, shared twenty-five years, and there was so much goodness between us. But if I’m honest, a lot of what worked was also luck. We didn’t have the language. We didn’t have the tools. We were improvising with something that deserved to be built with intention. It wasn’t a lack of love. It…

May has always carried the energy of the mother. Of origin. Of where we come from. And this year, inside Seekers Circle, I want to use this month to explore something deeply personal and profound: the inner child.

The inner child is not a metaphor in the abstract sense. It is the living imprint of who we were when we were small. It is the collection of experiences, fears, dreams, wounds, joys, and unmet needs that shaped the way we learned to see the world. It is where our nervous system first learned what was safe and what was not. It is where we formed beliefs about love, about belonging, about money, about power, about worth.

Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, that younger part of us is still very present.

If our inner child learned that love had to be earned, we may overextend ourselves in relationships.And if…