Essence

We are born whole — perfect in essence, tender at the edges.
Yet the world can not leave us untouched.

Society, expectations, wounds, life itself —
push and shape us off course.
We strive to be good enough.
We stretch into shapes that don’t fit.
We learn fast, but forget ourselves faster.
We seek belonging, and bargain away pieces of our truth.
We reach, always reaching for more.
And in the rush, we fracture.
We fight to survive.

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Forgetting

At first it’s hard to see.
We mistake self improvement for growth.
We chase the better job, the cleaner habits, the stronger will.
We tell ourselves that when we’ve improved enough,
then we will arrive — happy, successful, whole.

But it never comes.
Not in any way that lasts.
And never the kind you can build a whole life on.

Because we are only reinforcing what we need to release.
Because the better version of the wrong self is still bondage.

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The essence remains whole; the form learns, forgets, and fractures.

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Bare to Bone — The Grace of Being Undone

Reclamation is not gentle polishing.
It doesn’t arrive neatly packaged.
We rarely choose it.
More often, life shoves us into it.

It is sorting through the wreckage,
pulling mangles parts from the debris,
stripping away the self shaped by the world,
remembering the original pulse that is ours.

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Remembering

Homecoming is the deep exhale, the recognition:
This is who I am,
This is what I was put here to be,
This is where I belong.

Before homecoming, we fight to survive as someone we are not —
a battle that can never be won.
With homecoming we become grounded in truth,
and the struggle shifts.

This is Changing for Survival™
dismantling expectation and conditioning
so life serves life.

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Spine & Stone

But the wreckage doesn’t vanish when you find home.
The work is still hard —
but now it’s real.

No more patching. No more polishing.
Only genuine restructuring.

Home gives you ground.
Your real self holds you steady.
And the old conflict begins to loosen:
they say I should
gives way to I choose, I am.

Without that ground you’d never last —
but with it,
you find the strength to keep tearing away what was never you.

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Unfurling

And strength rises.
Not from striving,
but from essence itself.

Real strength.
Not borrowed. Not forced.
The quiet power of being true.

From that place, we no longer merely survive.
We unfurl. We rise. We emerge.
We have become.

And in our becoming
we leave the world less fractured than we entered it.

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