249 days ago, my husband, Ryan and I found out we were going to become parents. For eight months, we’ve oriented our lives around preparing to meet our son earthside in early April. Today, April 9th, marks his “official” due date.

Although we’ve since learned that only ~4% of babies arrive on their expected day, it feels momentous to have made it to 40 weeks. As we head into the birth portal to welcome our baby to the world (and before our lives change irrevocably), I want to memorialize this fleeting chapter of life — nine months of straddling two worlds, standing at the threshold of becoming a mother.

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The journey toward becoming a mother, known as matrescence, has been filled with surprises and revelations. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of nine months, it’s how singular each person’s experience is. It’s hard to anticipate exactly what hand you’ll be dealt, especially in a first pregnancy. So much of the experience has been surrendering to the waves of the unknown.

Here are my field notes from the last nine months:

1. The prenatal resources in San Francisco are abundant

At the onset, I had expected navigating pregnancy in San Francisco, a notoriously childless city known for a greater population of dogs than children, to feel lonely. Instead, I was surprised to find an abundance of resources for expecting moms scattered across the city.

My main outlet for plugging into the collective experience of moms-to-be came in the form of workout classes. Shortly after learning that we were expecting, I did a quick search on ClassPass and found several studios that offered pre-natal classes.

Starting Week 7, I joined a weekly pre-natal strength class at BODY, looking for guidance on how to move my body now that I had our baby’s safety to consider. Those early weeks were filled with gratitude, trepidation, and anxiety.

During my earliest prenatal appointments, I was made acutely aware by our traditional healthcare system of the miscarriage rates in the first twelve weeks, a subtle reminder to temper my excitement. Rather than create space to hold the duality of the risk of early pregnancy and the joy of growing a life within me, the system flattened the experience to a series of statistics.

Early on, we hadn’t shared the news with many people in our community yet, but for a few hours each week, I was surrounded by other women who were embarking on a similar journey of uncertainty and change — many who were much further along than me, giving me hope that everything would be alright. Being around other pregnant women normalized the unfamiliar changes happening to my body, serving as a respite from my day-to-day where life around me carried on as usual while I felt myself stepping into an entirely new universe.

In the months that followed, I stumbled upon more and more resources designed to support expecting mothers across San Francisco from the SF Birth Center to Natural Resources to birth doulas to yoga practitioners to lactation consultants to acupuncturists and everything in between. (I’ll share a full list of resources in a future piece.)

2. Surround yourself with a team of practitioners who empower you to make decisions grounded in your intuition

When I walked into this season, nervous about how isolating it might feel to be pregnant in San Francisco, all I knew was the traditional medical system. I had no idea just how many local practitioners have dedicated their lives to bringing life into this world.

In my late twenties, I had a destabilizing encounter with the traditional medical system that left me skeptical of spending one of the most important days of my life, delivering my child, in a hospital setting. Throughout the process, I’d felt a stripping of my agency unlike anything I’d felt before or since. While I began my prenatal care with an obstetrician, I was open to the idea that there might be an experience that better served my needs. Fortunately for me, San Francisco is home to world class medical systems and midwifery care.

Over the course of eight months, Ryan and I have assembled a Prenatal & Birth Team that we’ve been overjoyed to work with as we prepare for the arrival of our son. We sought to surround ourselves with practitioners who aren’t just experts in their field, but also possess the capacity to hold space for us as we navigate the emotional side of bringing new life to this world. Midwives and doulas who arm us with evidence-based research then support us as we make decisions anchored in our own intuition.

3. Creating life clarifies your boundaries and realigns your priorities

Having spent my last several years building communities and holding space for people of all walks of life, I’ve poured most of my energy outward. A few months before we conceived, I had an intuition that creating life would direct far more of my energy inward. I started to reorganize my life around less commitments and set firmer constraints on where I would focus my attention.

In hindsight, this realignment was one of the most important decisions I made to prepare myself for this season of life. My world quickly narrowed as much of my energy during first trimester was funneled toward creating life. I no longer had the capacity to engage in things that didn’t give me energy. Boundaries that were once challenging to set no longer seemed so difficult.

In social settings, I found it much easier to Irish exit and slip out when I no longer had the bandwidth to carry on a conversation. The interactions that drained me became far more obvious now that I had less energy to give. Increasingly, I sustained myself through one-on-one catch-ups, voice memos, and time alone.

4. Be kind to the growing tension between your ambitious and nesting selves

For months, I’ve felt the strong urge to nest, feeling next to no desire to leave the comfort of our home and our city. With all the changes on our horizon, I’ve craved cozy and predictable.

And yet, as I found myself braking in all facets of my life, life around me in San Francisco has accelerated at breakneck speeds. At the heart of it is advancements in AI — barreling forward, redefining what’s possible week over week.

Each week, I find myself attempting to feed multiple selves. The ambitious self that’s eager to ride the wave at the forefront of all this progress, spending her days vibe coding and spinning up new projects at work. Her rival: the nesting, on her-way-to-motherhood self that has a competing set of priorities. Prepare the baby’s closet, redesign our apartment, attend newborn care classes.

This unfamiliar self that requires far more rest than I’d previously ever allowed myself has risen to the top of the hierarchy of selves. While this is the exact season I’ve been waiting for, the tension between my selves feels all-consuming some days.

In the end, I’ve done my best to tend to each of them, giving them space to express their deepest needs and rest knowing that, for now, the self suspended in the chrysalis of becoming a mother takes precedence above all others.

5. The little things will become the big things

As my body has changed and my belly has grown to accommodate baby boy’s growth, the little things I once took for granted like getting out of a car and rolling out of bed were no longer as simple as they once were.

In many ways, this feels symbolic for the way our life will unfold as we step into parenthood. Over the last few months, as I’ve walked through San Francisco, belly in tow, I’ve felt a sense of nostalgia for how life once was. I watch as twenty-somethings walk through the park with their yoga mats hanging from their shoulders and lattes in hand, thinking back to a time when life was far simpler than I realized — that I could sign up for a workout class without thinking twice, go for a run during a free pocket of time, or meet up with a friend on a moment’s notice.

I feel a sadness knowing there’s no going back to that life and a certainty that I’m at peace with that reality. I think back to all that I did in my twenties and early thirties: the traveling, the experimenting with different jobs, the moving cross country, the taking up new hobbies, maximizing every moment I had.

And I feel a deep gratitude to younger me for always making the most out of the moment she had, for the existential dread she felt that she was running out of some sort of time because the reality was: the little things that she once took for granted will one day become the big things.

6. Ride the waves of unpreparedness

Much of navigating pregnancy has been an act of surrendering. Each trimester has felt like a new season and required a new level of preparedness. It took me several years to arrive at being ready to open the conception portal.

Once we conceived, I was unprepared for the intensity of the bouts of nausea I experienced and the lack of energy I had to do anything I’d historically loved: writing, working out, getting outdoors. The days when the nausea were particularly bad, I could imagine a younger version of me resenting being pregnant. But instead, despite how painful it felt, I found myself anchored to my love for this small baby, knowing that he relied on me to survive. I knew that the nausea was a good sign — that my hormones were shifting to create a home for him within me — and I held on to that knowing to buoy me through the worst of it.

By the time I reached second trimester, the nausea felt like my new normal so I was pleasantly surprised when slowly then all at once, the food aversions I’d been living with left as quietly as they came. During second trimester, I noticed how subdued my emotions had become. I no longer experienced the roller coaster of emotions brought on by my menstrual cycle.

I was unprepared for the dullness in how I felt day to day. In media, it’s common to see pregnant women bursting into tears at the sight of anything remotely tender. Rather than see a ramp up in tears, I was surprised to find that it was much harder to access the full spectrum of my emotions. I was now oscillating between just a handful of emotions. While part of the reason for this emotional shift was certainly tied to all the hormonal changes happening in my body, I suspect another reason was the result of a defense mechanism my body constructed to keep me safe, suppressing the risk of heartbreak.

Despite the fortune of a smooth conception and first trimester, I felt a persistent fear that something might go wrong. For the first half of my pregnancy, I found it difficult to fully bask in the joy of expecting a baby boy. Relief finally came during our comprehensive 20-week scan that confirmed that he was hitting all the right milestones. Seeing (and soon feeling) his little body move inside me gave me a sense of peace that I hadn’t realized I needed. I was unprepared for the fear I would feel about fully embracing the existence of our baby.

Third trimester came on fast and furious. For the first time, I felt a noticeable change in the way my body was carrying the weight. I’d developed subtle then unrelenting pelvic pain. In March, a heat wave blanketed the Bay Area, shattering multiple records and aggravating the end-of-pregnancy swelling that suddenly made itself known. One morning, I woke up to the sensation of my left hand detaching from my wrist. The pain was likely the combination of swelling and the presence of relaxin, a hormone that loosens ligaments in the weeks leading up to labor. For two weeks, I struggled to manage the swelling, wrist pain, and pelvic tension, realizing how lucky I’d been leading up to the final stretch. What I had thought was a middle of the road experience had actually been an incredibly smooth experience. I was unprepared for what the final weeks dealt me.

Now, in our final days before his arrival, I’ve oscillated between patience and impatience, frenzy and peace, fear and surrender. In this (and every) moment, I’m as prepared as I’ll ever be.

7. The most important experiences in life are the most uncertain

Our arrival to and departure from this world are two of the most uncertain experiences that we have in this lifetime. Sitting here as I write, waiting for a sign that our son is ready to join us, I now understand why our medical system opts to schedule inductions and create a sense of certainty amidst a deeply uncertain moment in time. It allows for the whole system to run smoother.

Yet, labor and birth are inherently messy and uncertain. In these final weeks, there has been a sense of anticipation as we wait, not knowing when our baby will arrive. Unlike most important days in our life (graduating, getting married, starting a new job), the not knowing makes it hard to plan other aspects of life. Will this baby arrive weeks ahead of “schedule” or take his time making his entrance? When do we need to have our pre-prepped meals ready by? When should my mom book her flight out west? Should I start encouraging labor now or wait until we arrive at 40 weeks?

For the last several weeks leading up to today, I’ve been in states of frenzy, feeling the scarcity of time before me as we prepared the apartment for him and took care of all the administrative tasks I’ve procrastinated until now. As I check the final to dos off my list, I feel a sense of softening to letting it all go and appreciating that any day now will be the last of our ordinary world: life before baby.

8. Loosen your grasp on time

In the final weeks, I’ve found myself loosening my grasp on time, allowing the hours and minutes of each day to run into each other and become fluid. Each day, my schedule is centered around a handful of priorities. Beyond that, I do my best to let go of any need to control what comes next.

I allow my body to rest when it needs to rest, no longer resisting the 4AM wake-up, just to fall back asleep two hours later. I allow my body to accept the cramping as it prepares itself for labor, not turning over to check what time it is or monitor how long it’s happening (for now). I try my best to surrender to not knowing when we’ll meet our son.

I’m resting into the reality that I’m straddling two worlds with no timeline to mark when I’ll emerge on the other side.

9. You won’t know what you don’t know

It’s only on the other side of nine months that I can definitively say that I truly have no idea what to expect as we enter the birth portal and parenthood for the first time.

We’ve prepared in all the ways possible and yet, no class will truly prepare us for the moments ahead. After all, “knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

All I know to be true is that we’ll soon come face to face with the greatest surrender yet.

See you on the other side. 🩵

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Welcome to the second edition of Sunday Reverie: a bi-monthly series where I welcome you to pause, contemplate the question of the week, and return to yourself.

1. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea 🫖

2. Cue up this week’s soundtrack, Trust Your Path 🎧

3. Grab your journal and spend 15 minutes reflecting on what this week’s question evokes within you ✍️

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Last Friday, I woke up feeling unsettled about a big life transition on the horizon. After sitting for my daily meditation in hopes of quieting the ever growing list of to dos and worries that clouded my mind (no luck), I set out for my morning walk. Despite it being a spectacularly beautiful morning, I couldn’t shake the rumination.

Halfway through the walk, I had a choice to take the slightly longer route or hurry back home to get on with my day. Because I’d spent most of the walk lost in thought, I set an intention at the fork to return to my body if just for a few moments — to feel my feet on the ground, the warmth of the sun on my face, and the light breeze on my skin. I made the split-second decision to extend my walk.

As I wandered down the hill, I looked up briefly and something in the tree caught my eye — a bird perched on a branch statue-like. I squinted at its silhouette against the bright blue sky, trying to decipher what type of bird it might be as it stared straight ahead, still and motionless. Unlike the other birds that typically frequent this park in flocks, this one sat in solitude.

Captivated by his presence, I stopped to look around to see if anyone else passing by had noticed, but everyone else’s attention seemed to be elsewhere. Heads down, AirPods in, lost in conversation or in their own worlds.

Curious of the breed, I snapped a quick photo to investigate.

Within a few moments, photos of similar birds populated my screen: a Great Blue Heron, typically found near water. This cypress seemed like a peculiar place for him to rest considering the nearest lake, his natural habitat, was about two miles west.

The long, white plumes hanging from his chest, beard-like, lent him the air of an elderly sage who had traveled from afar to deliver me a message.

If like me, you believe that the universe gifts us wisdom in the form of animals and synchronicities then you too might have been interested in what blue herons represent.

Herons are known for their patience and precision, often hunting by standing perfectly still, trusting the right time to strike will reveal itself. With quiet self-reliance, they live at the edge of water and land, embodying a presence between two states.

Standing beneath the tree, I found myself wondering how often life offers its lessons in plain sight while we search for it everywhere but in the present moment.

It begged the question:

when was the last time I had looked up?

When we’re traversing unfamiliar territory, it’s natural to orient ourselves to the unknown by focusing on what's right in front of us. Looking down keeps us in motion and helps us navigate the obstacles ahead. Yet when our attention is cast down for too long, the wider world begins to fall out of view and we lose sight of what we were moving toward in the first place.

Most of the time, we have some intuitive sense of whether the path we’re walking down is the one for us. We set milestones to achieve along the way, marking our progress on the journey.

The challenge arises when we lose ourselves in the terrain beneath our feet and forget to turn our gaze toward the horizon. Maintaining perspective is the practice of holding the duality of staying present with our next step and grounding ourselves in what higher purpose this season of our life is in service of.

Connecting and reconnecting with what this chapter of life is all about allows us to zoom out from the distractions strewn about on the path in front of us when perhaps wisdom is waiting for us along the longer, meandering trail that we don’t dare waste our time wandering toward. When we find ourselves feeling rudderless and without a clear sense of direction, it’s often a sign that it’s time to return to our higher vision.

Reorienting toward the horizon is a daily practice. Setting intentions while remaining open to how the path unfolds before us, trusting that the next right step will reveal itself.

As I turned to walk home that morning, the great blue heron remained perched motionless above the path, a patient teacher waiting for whoever might remember to look up next.

Here’s an invitation to look up. You never know what extraordinary sign you’re searching for might be waiting for you in plain sight.

When’s the last time you looked up?

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Over the years, I’ve cultivated a weekly Sunday ritual that gives me the space to exhale the past week before inhaling the week ahead. At the start of the year, I added a simple question to the mix: “What did I learn last week that I’m integrating?”

In this process, I’ve found myself returning to 2-3 themes that emerge in different contexts each month, asking to be unraveled.

Living in the epicenter of AI development, it feels like our world (or perhaps just my bubble) is increasingly optimizing for speed and execution more than ever. The trouble is that it’s often in the pauses and subliminal space that our greatest insights surface.

As a small act of defiance, I’m experimenting with a bi-monthly series where I welcome you to pause and return to yourself. Every two weeks, I’ll offer a question that I’m contemplating and invite you to:

1. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea 🫖

2. Cue up some meditative music 🎧

3. Grab your journal and spend 15 minutes reflecting on what that week’s question evokes within you ✍️

The intention is to flip the script on traditional advice columns. Rather than seek advice from someone else, my hope is that this exercise becomes a ritual that inspires you to connect with your inner wisdom, one question at a time.

Onto this week’s question.

What higher purpose is this season of your life in service of?

Over the last six months, the central question that has been swirling in my mind is what higher purpose is everything I’m doing in service of?

Not higher purpose in the spiritual sense, but in the broader arc of the life I’m building.

Answering this question has been an exercise in owning the season I’m in and identifying the trade-offs I’m willing to make in order to prioritize The Thing that is most important to me in this chapter of life.

In a prior season, a younger me would have answered this question with some version of “maximizing my impact,” a relic of a time when work served as my singular source of meaning and external benchmarks of success were how I measured my self-worth.

After spending the last several years of examining who I am without work and learning how to find meaning beyond my day job, I no longer subscribe to work (in the traditional sense) as being my highest purpose.

These days, my conception of higher purpose is more expansive. At the core, it’s about building and living a full and fulfilling life — an amalgamation of starting a family, engaging in meaningful work, being in community with loved ones, and finding avenues to self-express.

2025 was the year that my center of gravity began to shift. In late spring, my husband, Ryan, and I decided that we were finally ready to open the portal to parenthood and began to realign our lives around that decision.

For the two years, orienting toward financial stability had taken a back seat as we each embarked on our respective sabbaticals — me exploring writing full-time then running a local community space and Ryan training to become a freedive instructor and breathwork coach. We both knew that we would soon turn our attention to growing our family, undertaking an irreversible set of responsibilities as Mom and Dad. The higher purpose then was to make the time to find ourselves and connect with the things that made us come alive so that we could arrive at our next chapter fully ourselves.

By mid-2025, we both felt at peace that we had fulfilled that season’s mandate and looked toward turning the page to the next chapter: starting our family.

Despite the fact that I intuitively knew that it was time, with impending change came resistance and fear. Once I arrived at the clarity that our next season was upon us, the hard work began: deciding how to balance the trade-offs we needed to make. Ryan and I agreed that our non-negotiables were staying in San Francisco and abundantly providing for our future child while living in this high-cost city. It was time to reorient back to building financial stability.

While I kicked off a job search in short order, for several months, I lived in doubt that I could find a job that would both provide the financial stability I yearned for and allow me to continue to cultivate my skills as a community builder. I worried that despite all the inner work I had done around untethering my self-worth from work, I’d slip back into old patterns once I returned to a more corporate environment. And that I would struggle to write — not for a lack of desire, but for a lack of time and space.

As I spoke with potential teams and evaluated job opportunities, it became clear that above all, I valued autonomy and the ability to own my schedule. After managing a team in my last role, the obvious next step was to continue to seek out management roles. Without the clarity that this next season called for something different, I would have followed my ego, chasing a title over optimizing for autonomy and stability. In the end, I joined a team based out of New York to oversee and grow our San Francisco Bay Area investor community without the responsibilities of managing a team on the ground.

This season, I’m in service of building a full life — one where I show up to a job I enjoy without losing myself in it, am present at home and in my community, expand my capacity to become a mother, and have the space to freely engage with writing without the pressure to monetize my craft.

And to me, that is enough.

What higher purpose is this season of your life in service of? I’d love to hear your reflections.

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There’s a Zen proverb that says life presents us with the same lesson over and over again until we grasp its teachings. Until then, the lesson expresses itself in new contexts.

The spirit of my annual review each year is to marinate in and metabolize the lessons that life has delivered me over the last 365 days. Pulling the thread through on each lesson is an act of transmuting struggle into meaning — a means to honor and release the ways I may have enabled my own suffering.

As we say farewell to 2025, I’m memorializing the year’s curriculum to make space for future me to learn the new lessons that 2026 will bring forth.

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Make decisions at the pace of your body’s intelligence

When I’m faced with a decision, I often find myself turning it over until the right next step becomes painfully obvious. Perhaps it’s an aversion for impulsiveness or a fear of failure — whatever it is, it’s kept me suspended in indecision long after my body has made its choice.

Despite a historical reluctance to trust the intelligence of my body, it often knows the decision I’ll make even as my mind is playing catch up, trying to rationalize it through pro con lists and contemplating the infinite outcomes.

This year, I spent many mental cycles betraying the clarity that the universe was delivering. Even when it became clear that it was time for me to move on from a pursuit or kindly decline an opportunity being presented, I found myself caught in mental loops and inadvertently prolonging the uncertainty that I was eager to put to bed.

Rather than resisting clarity and finality, I’ve learned to simply take the next aligned step. When I surrender to a decision in accordance with what my body is obviously signaling toward, it creates a reference point for my mind that it is safe to trust my body’s wisdom. There is no better way to integrate this lesson than to consistently put the reps in, one decision at a time.

As we move through life, the lessons grow subtler. This lesson was the latest iteration of learning to cultivate self-trust and giving up control.

You can only discern your no when you’re in touch with your yes

In early July, I went on my first jhana retreat with the Jhourney team. Unlike the prior modalities I’ve practiced, jhanas are about accessing deep levels of relaxation. During our daily group sits, bodies lay strewn across the meditation hall, all surrendered to their own form of rest.

Most of my experience meditating has been marked by rigidity, sitting still for an hour at a time and bringing awareness back to the breath when pain reared its head. At this retreat, the intention was to have as much fun as possible.

For the first time in over a decade of meditating, I found myself orienting an entire week around seeking the most enjoyable experience possible. In the middle of our retreat center, there was an in-ground pool surrounded by a dozen blue lounge chairs. I figured if I was meant to have fun, I might as well treat it like I was on vacation. As I meditated hours and hours to the light breeze by the pool, I unraveled into deeper and deeper states of relaxation, coming face to face with the most subtle ways I hold tension in my body and mind.

Within a few days, I relaxed enough to sense the subtle resistance that built in my body when I braced against something I didn’t want to think about or want to do. Cultivating the feeling of easing into flow and freedom is like building a muscle. With intentional practice, it feels as seamless as sinking into a warm bath. As I created new reference points throughout the week, it became far easier to identify the ways that nos landed in my body.

When I returned home, I felt the fog lift around two opportunities that I was contemplating. While both of them seemed right on paper, I could now feel a deeper resistance in my body — a knowing that neither of them were meant to be part of my next chapter. Once I made the decision to release both opportunities, I felt a pocket of spaciousness open up in my body as if to reaffirm that my body knew all along. Shortly after, a new door opened unexpectedly and presented me with an opportunity that felt more deeply aligned with my priorities for the season I was stepping into.

You won’t grind your way to aliveness

This lesson is one I’m grateful to walk away from 2025 having integrated. I spent much of my 20s convinced that if I just worked harder and longer, I’d find true fulfillment on the other side. Instead, grinding my life away resulted in arriving at a feeling of emptiness that I can only describe as burnout.

It turns out that investing time in things that intuitively make me feel alive — moving my body, spending meaningful time with friends, frolicking in the redwoods, writing a well-formed essay — is what fuels my best work. Rather than viewing these experiences as moments to be earned only after a long, hard week of work, I now sprinkle them throughout my days as sources of inspiration.

My favorite days of 2025 were decidedly ones that were full and varied, complete with moments of wonder and good work. A simple way to continue to orient toward aliveness is asking myself, “What can I do to make this 10% more fun?”

Be conscious of the games you’re opting to play

Life is a series of games. We’re all playing one game or another whether we’ve explicitly opted into them or not. I first woke up to this reality when I set off to take a sabbatical two years ago.

For most of my life, I had defaulted to the games that everyone around me was playing. Suddenly, I was stepping off the corporate treadmill in search of my pure ambition, who I was without work, and a new game to play. Unbeknownst to me, as I found my footing, I traded one widely played game for another alternative.

Instead of promotions and raises, I found myself optimizing for a new scorecard, internalizing it as my own. In the transition from game to game, I forgot that I could negotiate the rules.

It’s human to gravitate toward feeling like we’re a part of something greater than ourselves — to play within structures that offer us direction as we shape our own sense of purpose, but remember: it’s within your power to rewrite the rules of the game.

Set your sights on winning the games you’ve consciously chosen to play. After all, there’s no fulfillment that comes with playing stupid games to win stupid prizes.

Protecting people from your truth puts you out of connection with them

Growing up in a family system that fostered directness, I’ve often found myself softening how I express myself, hyperaware of how an interaction might land with others.

As I navigated a transformative experience this year, I felt myself holding back on sharing the joyful (and challenging) moments unfolding in my life, careful not to take up too much space. While deepening intimacy with my community was a top priority, by preemptively sanitizing my truth to “protect” friends, I unintentionally drove a wedge between us that left me feeling isolated and put me out of connection with them.

Rather than trust that my friends (particularly ones who were navigating hardships in their own lives) could dually hold their realities and welcome mine, I assumed a fragility that underestimated their capacity and the resilience of our relationship.

As I became aware of how I was undermining the depth I sought, I mustered up the courage to bring all parts of myself to these conversations and was met with an abundance of love.

As we turn the page to 2026, I wish you all the spaciousness to process your 2025 lessons and welcome in the next wave of wisdom. I can’t wait to root deeply into the new year and continue the journey back home to myself. Happy 2026!

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tl;dr: It’s annual review season and I’m excited to share this year’s edition of my Annual Recalibration. It’s designed to be a gateway to reflect on how life has played out over the last 365 days, revisit the moments that defined you, and make sense of the disparate strands of what’s happened that only make sense looking backward.

Grab the Guide 📋

Next weekend, I’m hosting our second annual End of Year Intentions Retreat. We’re experimenting with different formats for virtual and in-person events.

Interested in joining us? Let us know here!

We’re entering the portal of one of my favorite times of the year. For a few weeks, the world slows down and there’s a collective ease into the holiday season.

It all began with a letter my senior year of college. I was overcome with anticipation as we edged toward graduation. I’d spent my whole life working toward the distant reality of 2014 and now, it was finally on the horizon.

I had recently committed to my first full-time job and made the decision to stay in Boston. I wanted the space to process everything that had happened over the last three and a half years in preparation for entering the real world.

That winter break, my family traveled to Cancun to celebrate the holidays. On a whim, I packed a notepad. As I waited for them at the airport, I felt a jolt of inspiration to write a letter to myself as a capstone to the year.

I started by flipping through my calendar, jotting down the milestones, peaks, and valleys that had unfolded over the course of the year. By the end, I had a shortlist of experiences that had defined my 2013.

Over the next few days, I turned over how the year had gone: the joys, the heartaches, the triumphs, the disappointments, and how I’d showed up in the face of it all. It was clear I was ready to usher in a new chapter.

With a few hours left to the new year, I sat down and wrote myself a letter, trying to make sense of what had transpired in 2013 and detailing my intentions for 2014. Once I was done, I sealed the envelope, only to be opened again in 365 days.

In the ensuing decade, this letter writing ritual turned into an annual goal setting exercise. At the start of each year, I curated a new set of bucket list items, motivated by the never enough mentality that pervaded my life at the time.

For several years, I chased after external success and experiences like traveling to new countries and national parks, running my first marathon, getting promoted at work, and moving to a new city. It became harder and harder to outdo myself. After an epic 2019 that would have been impossible to top: moving cross-country, a new job, three international trips, and my first international marathon, it all came to a head in 2020 when we found ourselves in a global lockdown.

No longer able to anchor the success or failure of my year based on the number of new experiences abroad or new marathons run, I found myself directing my energy inward. After months of being forced to slow down and learning to appreciate the small daily moments, I found myself curious to explore my inner world. Why did I feel so energized after that experience? Did I disassociate during that conversation? Why did that interaction leave me spiraling?

And so began my first annual recalibration.

Guide to the Annual Recalibration

I typically reserve the last week of December to go deep on reflecting, processing, and integrating. Some years, I’ve found the spaciousness to start earlier in the month which gives me more time to sit with how life has played out over the last year and revisit old memories.

The process is designed to be a non-linear way to reflect on your year. The first step is to gather all the artifacts across 2025 to avoid defaulting to recency bias.

Once that’s done, you’re welcome to wander through the sections in whatever sequence feels most alive in your sense-making journey.

Grab the Guide 📋

In some instances, it’s helpful to have completed a prior exercise like setting intentions for 2026 before diving into curating a vision board for the new year, but perhaps spending time with your vision board actually inspires you to set some new intentions.

Here’s a preview of the experience:

⭐️ Gather the puzzle pieces

• Gather your memories, experiences, reflections, ideas, and feelings throughout the year

• Collecting these puzzle pieces allows you to build a complete view of your year rather than default to recency bias

Retrace the year

• Reflection is the heart of the Annual Recalibration

• Take the time to retrace your year and revisit the moments that defined you over the last 365 days

Share gratitudes

• Reflect on the people you’re most grateful for this year and couldn’t imagine living 2025 without

Set intentions

• Rather than just focusing on what you want to achieve in 2026, define who you aspire to become

• Compliment goal setting with identity aligning

Curate a vision board

• Once you’re clear on your intentions for the new year, the fun begins. What’s your vision look like? How do you want to feel?

• Use whatever tool feels most satisfying to you: magazines and poster boards, Pinterest, Figma, Canva, etc.

Write 2026 you a letter

• Using your intentions or vision board as inspiration, imagine a world where you’ve actualized your intentions over the next year

• Drop into the clarity of who you aspire to become

• Hand write the letter and seal the envelope to be read in 365 days

Say a final farewell

• All things must come to an end — what are you ready to leave behind this year?

• Take time to reflect on the beliefs, experiences, and relationships you’re ready to release

• Let go of what no longer serves you

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How are you approaching your annual review process? Share with us in the comments!

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Several weeks have come and gone since I last shared an update on the book writing process. Over the course of March, I found myself tangled up in a creative mess, unsure of what direction the project was headed in.

I’d intended to leave the garage door up, but as sawdust exploded across the room, I sheepishly rolled the door back down as I tried to make sense of the process. I know, I know — the whole point of this series (and process) was to get comfortable with welcoming the mess, but the fear of uncertainty got the best of me.

While piles of sawdust remain, I’m back with some semblance of how this journey will continue to unfold.

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At the end of March, I met up with two close friends for a writing retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains.

For the six weeks leading up to the retreat, I focused on writing first draft essays, getting as many words and stories down on paper as possible. My plan was to arrive at the retreat with a first draft of the manuscript so I could spend the weekend exploring what central themes the stories would hang from, what format the book would take, and how the next few months of writing would shape up.

The original intention for the book was to gather a collection of essays — I figured it was simply a matter of shuffling drafts around until a table of contents emerged. But as I arranged and rearranged the drafts, more and more questions revealed themselves, unraveling the core assumptions that held the process together.

While part of me wanted to commit to the original plan and finalize the first draft, another part nudged me to take a step back to make space for something greater: a cohesive narrative interwoven with research backing my lived experience. The stories wanted to be cohered and coalesced, not compiled. I could feel myself resist the call, knowing this version of the project would be far more effortful than bundling a series of essays together.

Acts of creation, like writing a book, are generative by nature — unfolding through emergence rather than through force. Attempting to shape the shapelessness resulted in even more shapelessness.

Uncertainty loomed as I debated whether I was ready and willing to commit to many more months of this project.

Fortunately for me, amidst all the uncertainty, I was on the retreat with two women who I deeply trust, each navigating their own book journey. The fog of dread began to lift as they each shared their own creative blocks and challenges.

The big questions that had felt overwhelming began to lose their grip. As each debrief with them pulled me out of my own spiral, a shared rhythm began to emerge — an experience my friend, , calls “creative regulation.”

Our nervous systems began syncing through the act of shared creation and metabolizing doubt into possibility.

I call this creative co-regulation. A ‘group nervous system’ forms when we create together—one that can hold far more tension, complexity, and insight than any individual can alone.

And that’s exactly what happened for me at the retreat.

I could have second-guessed my seven-book realization. I could have talked myself out of it. But instead, I was surrounded by two amazing women who didn’t let me collapse into doubt. They helped me expand into clarity.

Creative co-regulation is how you go from second-guessing yourself in isolation to actually finishing—with sanity, momentum, and a crew of brilliant humans cheering you on.

— Kelly Wilde Miller, Creating in Community

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I returned home with a greater capacity to hold the uncertainty and decided to retool how I’d structured my process.

When I first started the project, I’d resisted anchoring my progress to traditional publishing benchmarks, forgoing word count targets and timelines in favor of a more free-flowing creative process.

But inevitably, I felt the mounting tension between flow and form, needing structure to give shape to the ideas that spilled out in all directions. I began to realize that structure wouldn’t constrain my creativity, it would contain it.

In parallel to this process, I’ve been training for a half marathon. It was becoming clear to me just how helpful it was to have guardrails. Even if I was skipping a run here or there, at least I had a general sense of where I was on the map.

Rather than continue to resist a map, I took a step back to craft a clear timeline and set of milestones to work toward. I researched how long a typical non-fiction book is (roughly 70,000 to 120,000 words) and what timelines I’d need to operate on if I wanted to go the traditional publishing route instead of self-publishing.

Clarity around milestones and timelines allowed me to create and commit to a schedule that takes the thought out of what I need to work toward each week.

For the next 2-3 months, my main focus is continuing to write as much as possible with a target of 5,000 words per week and 20,000 words per month while pitching a few publications with sample chapters.

Unsurprisingly, it’s taken a move toward the middle way — a dance between form and freedom — to allow me to relax more deeply into the process.

If the first leg of the journey was about chasing flow and allowing stories to pour through me, this chapter is about allowing structure to guide me in shaping the remaining stories and grounding them in research.

As for the book: in between contemplating its future, I’ve drafted new chapters exploring weighty topics, tracing the arc of the Chinese American experience — reflecting on how far we’ve come since our ancestors first stepped foot in this country as unwelcome and unworthy immigrants.

It dawned on me that within my own lineage, our children’s generation will be the first of four generations to share the same cultural context as their parents, ending the cycle of cultural divide that began with their great grandparents.

As I’ve paged through the drafts, I revisited the stories that have become the scaffolding for my narrative repair — a process of healing the disconnection I had long felt from Chinese culture, and by extension, from my family system.

But more importantly, I’ve come to recognize that my experience is not mine alone — it’s a story that many Chinese Americans share: a set of family and cultural dynamics shaped by the Cultural Revolution and immigration. And now, it’s time to rewrite that story.

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What creative projects have you found yourself entangled in? How have you navigated the tension between form and flow? Let us know in the comments :)

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If you enjoyed this piece, here are my earlier reflections on the book writing process:

Thanks to for reviewing a draft of this essay.

On the first of every month, I publish an essay as an invitation to pause, reflect, and begin again with renewed intention.

The traditional markers of time don’t exist in San Francisco. What makes this city most desirable — the mild climate all year round — is also what distorts our sense of time. When was the last time I saw that friend? Last month? Last quarter? Last year?

Without seasons to anchor us, we lose the shape of time, forgetting that life’s passing before us 30 days at at time.

This piece is a reminder to slow down, just for a moment, in an era that demands speed. The start of every month offers a threshold: to commit, to recommit, or release what no longer serves us. It’s a chance to start again.

My intention for April was to create moments to live aimlessly. March was filled with intensity and structure — I was craving spaciousness to sit back after weeks of leaning forward.

April delivered moments of living aimlessly in the form of a backpacking trip in Point Reyes to celebrate another revolution around the sun and another weekend meditation retreat. As the rhythm of hiking, one foot after another, and returning to the cushion again and again took hold, I noticed my mind wandering to deeper depths, guiding me back to the quiet instinct beneath all the noise.

I observed the avoidant attachment that emerges when I gravitate toward something that feels too big, too bold, too ambitious — the impulse to play it safe. The subtle step back, a delayed action, a subdued detachment.

Some time, long ago, I learned the lesson that if it doesn’t come easily, it must not be meant for me. A lesson meant to protect me from heartbreak, but one that taught me to abandon deep desires the moment that they demanded effort.

This conditioning has softened in me over time as I’ve learned to stay with the flavors of discomfort, giving myself the permission to unapologetically move toward the life that feels most true to me. But, every now and again, an experience stirs up a familiar hesitation and urge to shrink. Only now, I have the awareness to notice it and fully meet it as an old friend, a protector who once tried to keep me safe — making space for the instinct to self-preserve without allowing it to define me.

My intention for May is to nurture secure attachment with my desires, big and small.

As you contemplate your intention for May, I’ll share a song and two texts to ground into:

one grounding song

I’ve been spending more time at the San Francisco Zen Center, a local community temple that offers programming for new and seasoned meditators. Coincidentally, a friend invited me to a performance with a Zen Buddhist priest who also happens to be a live-looping musician. He layers ancient chants with beatboxing and handpan to create meditative soundscapes.

There’s something deeply inspiring about witnessing someone bring together two seemingly disparate crafts into one coherent experience. It’s a beautiful reminder that having the courage to live in our fullest expression is the greatest offering we can offer others.

two grounding texts

Being who you are will bring great peace to many others

— Mike Posner, Underneath It All

The world needs your voice. Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes.

— Maggie Kuhn

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our community’s April intentions

Thanks to Elliot and Mike who shared their April intentions with us!

• : My April intention is to cook more! I'd like to strengthen my basic cooking skills as well as develop a solid base of recipes to draw on. I got "How to Cook Everything" for my birthday so I'll be reading through that as well!

• : My intention in April is to find a balanced pace. Last month had chunks of connection and disconnection, so this month I set up recurring plans and hope it keeps me consistently grounded.

What’s your intention for May?

What are you committing to or releasing as we enter the new month? Let us know in the comments :)

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If you’re in San Francisco, join us for the monthly first of the month plunge in the bay. If you’re interested in joining future plunges and events, you can subscribe here for updates on upcoming events.

As part of the Human AIgency series, I’m exploring practical ways to leverage AI to become more agentic in our everyday lives. For this piece, I’m collaborating with my friend, , to spotlight how AI can support us in being more creative and experimental in the kitchen.

Sonja runs a Substack called and a virtual cookbook community called Color Club where she shares simple and delicious recipes and home cooking tips every week. Her intention is to educate us on the powerful effects (and the accessibility) of a colorful whole food diet.

We first met at Levels, the health tech startup on a mission to help people understand how their diet and lifestyle choices are impacting their metabolic health. We bonded over our shared obsessions for metabolically healthy food swaps, the perfect Notion setup, and the great outdoors.

I consider myself to be relatively novice in the kitchen. I’m a throw-everything-into-the-pan-and-make-a-stir-fry type of chef while Sonja is a home chef who creates new recipes on the weekly.

We chat about the fun ways we’ve used AI as our sous chef to level up our kitchen game.

AI in the kitchen

Cissy: I’m bullish on AI’s ability to help humans become more agentic, particularly when it comes to trying things we might typically shy away from.

In this case, I’ve historically spent very little time in the kitchen, partly because I’ve lacked the confidence to experiment. I’m perfectly content eating the same handful of meals on rotation so for most of my adult life, I’ve stuck to a few variations of the same recipes.

Using AI in the kitchen has allowed me to become far more experimental with mixing random ingredients together and more confident that whatever I’m cooking up will actually be edible. I’m cultivating a deeper intuition for cooking and feel more creatively empowered simply because I’m cooking more often.

As someone who loves cooking, what’s your stance on AI’s role in the kitchen?

Sonja: In the kitchen, I’ve basically replaced Google with ChatGPT for anything I’m wondering, want to learn more about, or want help brainstorming. I’ve become a better home chef by learning tips and techniques for things like quickly caramelizing onions (yes, it’s possible — see here!), braising, marinating, and more!

The thing I like about AI and cooking is that while it can help give ideas and techniques, AI can never fully replace the art of home cooking. It can help you determine what to make with what you’ve got in your fridge, what to do with random ingredients you have on hand, how to meal prep something new within the parameters of how you like to eat and cook, how to get the most flavor out of ingredients, or how to salvage a recipe gone wrong — but it’s still up to you to taste test and determine if you need more salt or spices and use your senses to modify dishes so they surprise and delight your taste buds. The best thing AI can do is help you (and home chefs everywhere!) develop a better intuition for how to combine ingredients and prepare meals in a way that helps you fall in love with cooking flavorful, nourishing meals at home.

The way I think about food is that it’s what helps us be and feel alive. Food meets our cellular needs, nourishes our bodies and minds, and supports our energy, health, and overall well-being. If ChatGPT can help me learn how to feel even more joy, pleasure from preparing and consuming naturally occurring unprocessed foods, then I’d say that’s a pretty excellent use case for AI!

ChatGPT: AI sous chef edition

Cissy: How do you leverage AI as part of your cooking process?

Sonja: I made a list and then ChatGPT helped me turn it into this epic table👇🏼🤣

The only thing ChatGPT can’t promise is that a recipe will taste good — that’s where a human absolutely must still be in the loop to test and modify. If I just whipped up recipes from ChatGPT and published them as is on my Substack or my Color Club, I’d have very few subscribers 🤣

Cissy: Two things I’ll add that have been particularly useful for my cooking process:

• Salvaging a recipe (e.g., replacing an ingredient if I’m out of it or messed up some measurement of the recipe)

• Taking a photo of what I have available and asking it to generate a good on-the-fly recipe that takes <X time

Cissy: Of all the ways you’ve used AI in the kitchen, do any stand out as favorites?

Sonja: I subscribe to an organic community sponsored agriculture (CSA) program near LA called Earth Matterz , which means every week I get a bunch of seasonal produce that I then have to figure out what to do with! I often turn to ChatGPT (see 2 min Loom below) to brainstorm what to do with it!

For example, this week, I got a Kabocha squash. It’s mid-March so I wanted something spring-y with it and I wanted it to be simple since I was going to make it during the week (think sheet pan or one pan meal). 👇🏼

Cissy: Where has AI fallen short as compared to a human recipe tester? What’s your process for modifying and improving recipes?

Sonja: AI has no palate (yet? 😱). It doesn’t know if a dressing has too much or not enough acid, or if it needs more fat to bring out the flavor. I’ve found when it comes to the right proportion of ingredients it’s often too conservative with salt, acid, and heat.

For example, for the squash miso sauce for this sheet pan dish — the first version ChatGPT gave me was SO boring and dull, it needed more lemon, more tahini, and a touch more sweetness. I experimented with 3 versions before I was happy with it.

Cissy: What’s a recipe you’re particularly proud of that you started by using AI?

Sonja: Here’s the Miso Kabocha Salmon with Asparagus and Snap Peas recipe I made this week with my ChatGPT sous chef!

I’ve got hundreds more recipes up on my Color Club, head here and use code MOREMYSELF for a free first month.

the future of AI in the kitchen

Cissy: What predictions do you have for how AI capabilities will evolve in the kitchen?

Sonja: While we’ve already seen robots in kitchens all around the country from Sweetgreen to White Castle, I predict we will see AI continue to show up when it comes to meal planning apps as well as even smart appliances (e.g., AI vision to check doneness and auto-adjust based on the recipe and real-time cooking feedback).

We’ll also probably see AI (if not happening already) being trained on massive datasets of cuisines and cultures to do flavor pairings and menu design. I can imagine AI helping usher in an even more personalized nutrition feedback loop: think eating a meal, automatically logging glucose, HRV, mood response, and refining future recommendations. It’s like Levels + a private chef!

However, I believe there is something so human and primal about cooking. I hope that AI never fully replaces the human experience of preparing food. When I prepare my own food, I feel a deeper connection to the food, the earth, and the natural world.

The only reason you are reading this sentence right now is because you eat food that fuels you and keeps you alive. Once you eat something, it literally becomes you and becomes part of your 37 trillion cells. One of my favorite quotes is by Wendell Berry.

Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, and that it is an inescapable and agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extend how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex.

— Wendell Berry, The Pleasures of Eating

No matter what happens with AI — positive or negative — we must always strive to not lose sight of the most important part: food is living fuel that connects us to the earth.

prompts for your AI sous chef

Cissy: What prompts would you recommend our readers try? I personally love:

• I’m baking X and Y — what should I season them with and how long do I need to bake them to make them flavorful and crispy?

• What’s a fun, cultural twist I could add to this dish (with Chinese flavor) while making it metabolically healthy?”

• I’m craving something comforting and colorful — can you help me create a bowl or plate that balances both using what I have in my fridge? (Add a photo)

Sonja: Any time you have any sort of cooking or meal planning question that pops up in your head like “I wonder what I should make this week” or “I wonder how I could use these two ingredients” — think of ChatGPT as you sous chef brainstorm partner.

Here are prompts I’ve used many times and love:

• I have X ,Y, Z and common pantry items — give me 5 ideas of dishes I could make in less than 30 minutes using whole food ingredients with about 30g of protein per serving

• I want to make a sauce that goes with XYZ — give me 5 ideas

• A recipe calls for X amounts of XYZ but I want to find a substitute, what can I substitute? What should I know about how the ingredients operate differently?

• Here are my ingredients I want to use and what I want to make. Write me a recipe for how to do it. (Then I test, modify, tweak, etc)

• What are tips to make AMAZING XYZ?

• I want to make X meals with seasonal ingredients. It’s X season and I live in X place. I avoid refined sugars, refined grains and seed oils, and try to make all blood sugar balanced meals. I like the cooking style of chefs like Sonja Manning, Molly Baz, Caro Chambers, Justine Dorion [fill in the name of your favorite chefs!]. Give me ideas for X meals!

If you enjoyed the recipe included above and want to try some of Sonja’s other recipes, head here, and use code MOREMYSELF for a free first month. (Not sponsored — I just love the work Sonja’s doing with Color Club and have personally enjoyed a number of her recipes!)

If you’re interested in other ways to use AI intentionally, you may enjoy:

If you’re new to either of our work, welcome! You can follow us here:

Cooking in Color

Colorful & easy recipes and bite-sized health tips for a metabolically healthy life.

By Sonja Manning

becoming | more myself

meditations on agency, humanity, and becoming more ourselves

By Cissy Hu

What are your favorite ways to use AI in the kitchen? Let us know in the comments!

Leave a comment

Last month, I shared my intention to create a ritual for this Substack community — a way to mark the passage of time together and begin each month by sharing the intention we want to carry forward. Shout out to the folks who shared their intentions with us :)

31 days have passed us by and now, we stand at April’s doorstep — the month of spring’s arrival, of rebirth, and of renewal.

March was full — full of numbness, gratitude, movement, revelation, healing, grief, travel, clarity, stagnant energy, trust falls, release, aliveness, fear, expansion, contraction, and resistance. Several seasons of life lived within the span of 31 days.

The intensity of March left me yearning for stillness and spaciousness — space to make sense of and give shape to all that had unfolded. To loosen up on the grasping, the striving, the relentless forward motion — and integrate everything March had delivered.

My intention for April is to create moments to live aimlessly.

As you contemplate your intention for April, I’ll share an album and text to ground into:

one grounding album

Mike Posner dropped a new album, The Beginning, in February to honor his journey of reclaiming self-sovereignty and emergence from darkness to light.

This album is a soundtrack to that transformation. The Beginning is at its core, an album that celebrates life’s beauty, even in its imperfection — pointing to the rainbows while acknowledging that the sun doesn’t always shine. This marks The Beginning of a new chapter — one built on truth, courage, and gratitude.

It’s 44 minutes long and he recommends you listen to the full soundtrack in one sitting the first time through. I listened to it laying underneath the redwoods and cannot recommend it enough.

one grounding text

Last weekend, I sat a Sesshin (a period of intense meditation) retreat at the San Francisco Zen Center to honor a new life tradition I started a year ago: do a meditation sit the month before my birthday.

Ever since I was young, the arrival of my birthday has stirred something existential within me — a quiet unraveling into questions of identity, meaning, and becoming. The days leading up to it always seem to loom with a certain heaviness, filled with expectation of how I’ll spend this precious day, marking the close of one year and the threshold of the next. There’s something simultaneously haunting and beautiful about the liminal space that birthdays invite us into.

By sitting a meditation retreat before my birthday’s arrival, I give myself the permission to rest into the non-duality of grief, gratitude, sadness, joy, excitement, boredom, anticipation, dread, regret, acceptance, hope, and despair. It serves as a reminder that the opposing tensions within us need no resolution at the threshold between old and new identities and chapters.

Despite knowing this, I grappled with all flavors of resistance leading up to the retreat. Resistance in unplugging to meditate, in my book writing process, in half marathon training, in birthday plans.

Life has been brimming with fullness lately — it’s been one big act of doing. Amidst it all, I’d forgotten that some days, living is about putting down the agendas, moving through the day aimlessly, and allowing the world to unfold before us.

During the first and final dharma talk, the Zen Center Abbot read us the poem Aimless Love, reminding us to meet each day, each moment, with tender attention and the openness to fall in love with the ordinary.

This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

— Billy Collins

our community’s March intentions

Thanks to everyone who shared their March intentions with us!

• : My intention for March is to open and embrace the full truth of what I'm feeling

• : It's been a long-standing intention, but starting in March (and continuing anon) I want to start putting more of myself out there, doing things before I'm ready, and living VISIBLY instead of in the quiet comfort of my own under-tested abilities - TL;DR, put some writing out there, go to open mics, and get back dating!

• : I've returned to my home city after 4 years of nomading and my intention is to ground myself into my community that's here

• : Mine is to pay more attention to all the good stuff already present in my life- one little thing every day, deeply felt. And to keep building my community for those who want to engage with life more & accept their call to adventure.

• : Mine is to cultivate a deeper intimacy and connection with my own creativity - and to really allow my reception of beauty in my life to drive inspired movement of creative energy

• : This month I am calling it “Mission Non-stimulation March”

  The reason? I’ve noticed too much dependency on my electronics and feeling too “plugged in”. I had a moment at the overstimulated Central mall in Chiang Rai, Thailand where I saw everyone glued to their screens around me at the food court. Even the children

  • Here are the fifteen small actions that Jen set out to take on for this project

What’s your intention for April?

What’s on your mind as we step into April? Let us know in the comments!

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If you’re in San Francisco, join us for this morning’s April Fools edition of the plunge.

If you’re interested in joining for future plunges, RSVP "Can't Go" and you'll be added to future invites.

Happy first of the month! Every first, my partner and I convene a group of people to run into the San Francisco bay. People who first meet me and only know me as the host of this plunge often misperceive me as a hardo who loves cold water.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s precisely because I hate cold water that I return to the bay the first sunrise of every month. It serves as my monthly reminder that time is passing. In a city where the days and weeks and months blur together, I want to embrace the reality of the world spinning around us and give myself permission to start again.

As I began researching social rituals this month and ways to embed more of it into my life, I’ve thought a lot about the ritual that already exists in my life — namely, this monthly plunge.

It’s funny it’s taken me this long to consider introducing this ritual to my Substack community. Every first, we circle up on the Aquatic Park bleachers, reflect on the purpose of our time together, then each share our intention for the upcoming month. Once everyone’s shared, we run around the bleachers to warm up, assemble on the beach, then run into the water screaming our intention.

There’s something so euphoric about it all.

While I can’t replicate the feeling of running into the bay digitally (I strongly recommend starting the month doing something that makes you come alive), I’d like to start a monthly ritual here to mark the passage of time together and welcome you to share your intention for the next month with this community.

This month, I’m grappling with our mortality. I’m sitting with what it means to live from a place of finitude — not leaving words unsaid and dreams unfulfilled. What does it mean to ground into our highest truth over and over again? Over the years, I’ve increasingly moved into deeper alignment with my truth, but every now and again, I slip into inertia.

My intention for March is to ground into and live from my highest truth.

As you contemplate your intention for March, I’ll leave you with a song and text to ground into:

one grounding song

The opening stanza often confuses friends I share this song with — it’s worth listening to the full track, I promise.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That′s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

So here we are, on this pale blue dot. Tiny specs of dust coming into existence for a moment. Hurling through space and time, only to flicker back out after a few moments. These moments, these are all we have in this life. We work, we laugh, we cry, we make love, we write books, we build empires, we wage wars.

We often try to ignore the fact that these moments are temporary. That all our empires and the gross national product, our art and our literature, our $300 designer jeans, all of our knowledge and technology, creativity and legacy is erased. It′s all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.

one grounding text

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

What’s your intention for March?

I’d love to hear what’s on your mind for the new month — let us know in the comments!

Leave a comment

If you’re in San Francisco, join us for the April Fools edition of the plunge.

• Week 1: Writing my first book with the garage door up

• Week 2: So, what's your book about?

The last two weeks of writing have been a tug-of-war between inspiration and resistance. The intense resurgence in energy I felt three weeks ago has waned as I find and settle into my rhythm.

Some mornings, inertia takes hold and flow feels just beyond my reach. As I write, I notice a subtle clenching, a desire to retreat toward safety rather than put raw truth to paper. This desire to hold back, rooted in the fear of what if someone reads this, compels me to write these stories in a linear fashion, wringing all struggle, vulnerability, and raw emotion from the first draft.

And yet, the reality is that no one will read these first drafts. Writing the first draft of a book, as I’m coming to learn, is the act of getting comfortable writing as if no one is reading.

This part of the process is about creating space to allow truth to tumble out of me in all its imperfections, messiness, and rawness — inviting the words to spill onto the page, unbridled and unapologetic. That’s where the resonance and power of these stories live.

I’m not writing this first draft for my readers, my parents, my friends, or an audience. I’m writing for me — a younger me. A girl who longed to find herself and feel seen, to know that she wasn’t alone, and that her struggles weren’t in vain. This book is an offering to her: a testament to the simple truth that life was never about having the answers, but about asking the questions and living into them.

The filtered, sanitized versions of our experiences do our stories injustice — if we refine and polish our stories from the start, what’s left to share with the world by the final draft?

So every morning, I remind myself: let the words flow, let it crack me wide open, and let it rip.

As I’m reexamining how I write through this process of writing a book, these lessons are reshaping the way I approach short form pieces.

There are two ways I’m experimenting with emboldening myself and letting it rip:

1. Write as if I’m journaling: when I write stream of conscious, it often becomes clear there are still emotional blocks to certain experiences that need more time to be worked through and fully processed — the truth isn’t yet ready to be set free

2. Write out loud: turning on an AI voice recorder, going for a walk, and letting the stories move through me more naturally — the act of writing happens after my words are transcribed and I can sit with what came through

constraining the Muse

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on her relationship with her creative muse — a force that knows no bounds, often arriving to inspire her at all hours of the day. In the most inspired and creative seasons of my life, I feel a similar connection to my Muse. A sudden thought will cross my mind, pleading for me to sit down and unravel it. Sometimes, its unannounced arrival is welcome and I can create the space to make sense of it — other times, it’s the middle of the night and I wish to go to sleep.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked on creating the conditions to welcome my muse first thing every morning. I tend to be most attuned, clear-headed right after waking up, meditating, and journaling. While I’m still not as consistent as I’d like to be with protecting my morning writing block, I’m more disciplined about when it ends so that writing sessions don’t spill into the rest of my day.

Starting my day with writing is meant to fuel me, not drain me. At some point, it’s time to step away — I’d rather leave my session buzzing with inspiration than hollowed by exertion. The external constraint of having a workout class right after my scheduled session has been a helpful way to reinforce the boundaries I’m setting.

strong intentions, loosely held

At the start of each week, I’ve been experimenting with explicitly planning out what chapters I intend to write that week. Last week, I specified the exact chapters I wanted to finish first drafts for, but that felt too constraining. This week, I made space for inspiration to strike, setting an intention for two chapters I’d like to write, but welcoming whatever chapters wanted to materialize.

capturing the levity

The morning I wrote this update, the weather was impeccable. I used to spend many mornings outside, writing on a bench in my local park, drawing inspiration from the world around me. Sitting alone at a desk can feel so isolating — a drain in life force rather than a recharge.

Being outside that morning reminded me of the levity of writing. That writing is about capturing the magic the moment it strikes and allowing the next moment, the moment after that, and the moment after that to unfold until I have a collection of words that make up an essay, a book.

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Six years ago today, I packed the last of my things into three suitcases and a backpack, watched snowflakes float above the Boston skyline for a final time before I boarded a San Francisco-bound flight. Moving across country to a new city is a funny thing — you say goodbye to nearly everyone you’ve ever known, hop on a flight with everything you own, and seven hours later, you’re “home.”

I landed at SFO as a hopeful, lost 20-something, carrying the weight of her big dreams and a deep yearning to change the trajectory of her life — not just the join-a-startup-and-ride-the-rocketship kind of dream, but a quieter, more subtle desire to stumble upon herself again and remember who she was beneath all the striving.

Despite dreaming of building a life in California for a year before I finally made the move, it was the most on-a-whim-life-altering decision I’ve ever made. The entire move came together — from new job offer in hand to landing at SFO — over the course of 20 days. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I was swept up by an overwhelming urgency to leave Boston and get started with my life that awaited in San Francisco.

I’d spent most of my life living on the east coast between New York and Boston. The cold winters and conventional ways of being had hardened me. Back in Boston, I’d slowly burned out climbing the traditional corporate ladder. I knew of the Bay Area as a place where untraditional people did untraditional things — where startups were built by founders who, by traditional standards, had no business running a company and yet, there they were running a company.

And that’s the thing about San Francisco that first called to me: a place where traditional scripts are set ablaze, and from their ashes, the freedom to reinvent and self-express emerges. This radical sense of agency that permeates the region manifests as people being fiercely devoted to their work and the way they lead their lives. Every next person you meet is charting a course so uniquely interesting that you’re inspired to redraw your own boundaries and venture into uncharted territory.

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What drew me to the city initially wasn’t so different than what I suspect draws many others out here. What surprised me is what kept me here.

After being conditioned to walk through life with a purpose, I wanted to live in a city that could teach me how to create space to tend to my grandest ambitions and slow down — walk for the sake of walking, live for the sake of living.

I moved here to be propelled by the momentum of others making sense of their big dreams. Instead, I found a city that asked of me why I harbored these dreams in the first place — inviting me to question who I was before they ever took hold of me. Were these dreams truly mine or borrowed visions that I’d subconsciously inherited?

What I’ve appreciated most about this city and its culture is how it’s taught me how to feel deeply, pushed me to explore edges that I didn’t know existed, and freed me from the expectations of who I once thought I should be.

In the ensuing years, I’ve come to realize the urgency to move to San Francisco was driven by a homecoming I hadn’t known I needed. For so long, I’d searched for a place where I could freely speak my dreams into existence and be challenged to dream bigger — but what I’d really been seeking was the courage to see myself more clearly and to be seen for who I really am.

On the east coast, I spent most of my life as the minority. Suddenly, in the Bay Area, I was just one of many Asian American women walking down the street, grocery shopping, doing a workout class, living life. For too long, my relationship with my heritage ended with my ability to order the right flavor of dumplings for friends on a trip to Chinatown. Here, there are Lunar New Year parties, cultural identity workshops, dads walking their bi-racial kids to Mandarin Immersion school. It’s a place where Chinese American history is woven into the fabric of the city.

I often reflect on that 20-something who first arrived in this city. The girl who needed several revolutions around the sun to finally settle into who she is. And while the revolutions continue, it’s in large part thanks to belonging to this city that she’s learned to belong to herself.

Despite the lack of seasons here, I’ve cycled through more seasons of losing and finding myself than I can count. More than any place, this city has allowed me to reinvent myself over and over again — because San Francisco is the city of invention and reinvention if you allow it to be.

I originally published a version of this piece on my four year anniversary in 2023. As I read through the list I first curated, I was reminded that despite how much has changed over the last two years, how much has stayed the same and just how persistently my love for San Francisco continues to grow.

In honor of six years, here’s an upgraded list of the feelings and moments brought by life in San Francisco:

1. The fearlessness of walking out of my apartment with a light jacket, only to be met with regret for not bringing an extra layer as the evening chill settles in the city

2. The vindication of encouraging a friend to visit, avoiding Fisherman's Wharf and Union Square at all costs, giving them a real tour of San Francisco, and them arriving at the conclusion of “I get why you love living here so much”

3. The conviction that the Bay Area cold just hits different, not that we’ve all gotten softer

4. The realization that perhaps living here is softening our hardened edges and giving us a deeper capacity to feel

5. The liveliness and buzz of the city on a day that tops 70°F

6. The absurdity of seeing someone in a down puffer walking past someone in shorts, somehow both dressed for the same weather

7. The liberation of wearing whatever I please (probably athleisure) because no one in the city of San Francisco cares

8. The exhilaration of flying down Hawk Hill towards Golden Gate Bridge on a bike ride, reveling in the warmth before the windy ride back over the Bridge

9. The exhaustion of walking up Pac Heights and consequent confusion as to how my leg muscles still haven't adapted to the city's gradient

10. The novelty of walking past a self-driving car and being reminded that the future is always just around the corner

11. The amusement of watching that same car attempt to navigate around a double-parked line of cars in front of a church on Sunday morning

12. The nostalgia for my days cruising down the 101 as a tech shuttle drives past me and the consequent relief that I’m now based in the city

13. The nausea from driving the winding roads toward Stinson Beach

14. The anticipation of whether the drive to Tahoe will take 4 or 8 hours

15. The solidarity of pedaling down the Wiggle alongside other cyclists, all united in our mission to avoid the hills on our ride toward Golden Gate Park

16. The surprise of stumbling upon a new trail in Golden Gate Park

17. The ease of being an outdoors person by simply walking through a neighborhood and onto urban hikes in the middle of the city

18. The fulfillment of discovering new hobbies made possible by this city’s climate and culture

19. The satisfaction of how serious we are about throwing unconventional events

20. The hilarity of debating the perennial question, "What are your thoughts on San Francisco versus New York?" and always concluding that SF is more our speed

21. The wisdom of knowing better than to try and persuade someone who hates SF of all its magic

22. The acceptance of SF despite all its flaws and imperfections

23. The joy that spending time with friends can be more about park picnics and urban hikes than loud bars and boozy brunches

24. The desire for serenity on a trip to Banya only to find a packed sauna filled with people for aromatherapy

25. The contentment of meditating with friends on a Sunday morning

26. The depth of being seen as conversations with friends meander into our hopes, our dreams, and our fears

27. The thrill of RSVPing on Partiful or Luma to see who else is going

28. The spontaneity of running into an online friend at an event at The Commons

29. The boundaries we're working on setting when "let's co-work" inevitably devolves into a deep catch up

30. The inevitability of overhearing someone pitch their AI startup, make the case for psychedelics, and detail their biohacking regimen all within the first three minutes of walking into the coffeeshop

31. The acknowledgment that SF is more of a sleepy town than the center of the universe and loving it all the same

32. The stillness brought by early mornings before the city awakes and traces of eucalyptus linger in the air

33. The gratitude for living in a state with more national parks than any other

34. The awe of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from any angle, but especially coming over Pac Heights and through the Robin Williams Tunnel

35. The vastness of overlooking the Pacific coast from what truly feels like Lands End

36. The peacefulness of watching waves crash ashore, reminding us that it all comes and goes, ebbs and flows

37. The fear moments before running into the Bay and diving headfirst into the cold water

38. The quietude that descends upon the city as everyone heads home for the holidays or Tahoe for their ski lease

39. The longing for some semblance of seasons to remind us time is in fact passing before us

40. The butterflies of coming home as I land in SFO after time away

41. The certainty that no US airport rivals SFO’s Terminal 1

42. The relief we’re all trying to travel less and prioritize rooting down in the city

43. The pride I’ve cultivated for being a Chinese American woman and realization that the shame I once felt for being different was not mine alone

44. The sense of infinite possibility and the belief the future's ours to build

45. The optimism that we’ll build an intergenerational community with our friends and raise our kids together in or near this city

46. The agency that permeates the city

47. The love I feel for this city even after all this time

48. The appreciation that after all these stages of reinvention, it was always about finding my way back to myself

49. And still yet, the freedom to become more myself

Thanks for being here! What feelings has living in your city or town evoked from you? Leave a comment or say hi on Twitter :)

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To that end, I’m enabling the subscriber chat for More Myself in hopes of seeding more connectivity across this community and creating space for us to grapple with the big questions together :)

I’ve been contemplating ways I can better serve this community and get to know you better. As I reconfigure my publishing schedule for my latest projects (Human AIgency and book writing), my first questions for y’all are:

• How does Substack fit into your lives?

• When do you typically read Substack essays? Weekdays? Weekends? Randomly?

Let me know in the chat 💬

After announcing last week that I’d be sharing the process of writing my first book, I received a few questions on what my book is about.

I've intentionally been vague about the contents of the book because so much of the evolution of this book is unfolding before me, still to be shaped. This journey of writing the book itself will undoubtedly play a role in dictating what final words go to print.

What I can share is that this book will likely be a collection of essays and stories — experiences that I’ve processed, but haven’t yet had the courage to share more broadly. Much of my inner work has allowed me to arrive at a place where I often find myself grappling with the joy of mourning the life that could have been.

This work has involved healing my resentment toward my cultural identity, repairing my relationship with my parents, learning to love unconditionally, grappling with existential crises, and becoming more myself along the way.

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It’s been helpful to think about this project non-linearly. All good books have a linearity and coherence to them — thoughtful timelines and storylines delicately weaved together. But that’s not how books are created and certainly not how this book will be created.

It’s too early for coherence. My main job in this phase is to write my first messy draft and channel as many stories that speak to me as possible. Once I have a first draft of each story, I’ll start making sense of the sequencing.

None of the inner work I’ve done over the past three years has been linear and given that this book is inspired and made possible by my journey inward, it feels only right to embrace the non-linearity of this project.

The beauty of this process is that as I visit old stories and start to weave a narrative around them, new insights emerge. Given that I’ve processed many of these experiences over and over, I hadn’t expected to continue to be met by deeper revelations, but it appears there are new lessons eager to materialize as I sit down to make them legible to an outside audience.

Week 2 Update

Much of this week was about getting organized and finding my rhythm.

My main intention was to figure out a process for how I wanted to manage my writing block each day (a mix of strategizing and writing? all writing?) and whether it was worth trying to book write every day or dedicate a few mornings to other essays I’m writing.

I ended up having three productive blocks and two not so productive ones. I closed the week writing 2.5 first draft essays (~2500 words). Not bad for the first official week of writing (although it did not feel very good mid-way through my second uninspired writing session).

Reflections from the week

1. Stay connected with my enablers and conscious of my blockers. The two most important questions I’ve been asking myself this week are:

   • What’s keeping me writing this book?

     • An accountability buddy (I cannot overstate how important it’s been for me venturing into the unknown to have a trusted friend by my side)

     • A deadline to work toward (our March book retreat)

     • A structured digital workspace (Google Docs to write, Lightpage to capture fleeting thoughts through writing & voice memos, Notion to project manage)

   • What’s keeping me from writing this book?

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It’s tiiime! I’m finally embarking on my biggest creative project yet: writing my first book.

It’s been approximately three days since this months-in-the-making idea all came together. It’s been even more months since I’ve felt so compelled to write that I couldn’t sleep. The night of the breakthrough, stories emerged as I tried to fall asleep, writing and rewriting themselves in my mind. Eventually, I gave up trying to sleep, grabbed my laptop, and just let the ideas flow through me. Given my orientation toward following aliveness these days, I think I’ve stepped on to the right path.

I’ve pendulum swung quite a bit on whether I want to share my book writing process publicly, largely because I had convinced myself that serializing my book — releasing it one chapter at a time on Substack — would be a good idea, but I now know myself and my writing process well enough to know that approach is what will keep me from writing this book.

What I actually want to do is write the book with the garage door up. Once I came to this realization on Thursday night, the pieces all clicked into place.

I finally feel ready. This book has been brewing in me — in many ways, it feels like it’s already been written, I just need to sit down and bring it earth side.

This all began back in 2023. In the span of a few months, I’d become good friends with a few authors I respected. Two of them started asking me when I’d write a book and after enough nudging, the idea of me writing my own book no longer felt so farfetched. By the end of the year I shared my intention to write a book more publicly, but at that point, I had no idea what the full process would entail.

Soon after I made my declaration, I went into a state of contraction and fear, promptly deprioritizing the book for several months.

Then in mid-2024, in moments of quietude during kundalini yoga, I started hearing a voice gently calling me to return to China to be with my grandmother while she was nearing end of life. You can be with her in the hospital and write your book, it whispered. Eventually, I realized this must be my intuition speaking and decided to take a leave of absence from my masters program in the spring to travel between the US and China. I took my first trip back in December, but my work at The Commons and a lot of uncertainty with where my grandmother will be transferred after the ICU has kept me in San Francisco for the time being.

My original plan was to fly to China mid-January then fly back last Thursday, February 6th, with a draft of my first book. While my return to China remains in a holding pattern, I’ve been scheming a book retreat with a friend. Then Thursday evening, as fate would have it, I had a catch-up call with my childhood best friend who is serendipitously going through her own creative process and breakthrough in writing her first book. (This is the best friend who I used to write short stories with during recess in fifth grade.) By the end of the call, we’d committed to drafting up a plan and setting up a weekly check-in to keep one another accountable in getting our first drafts done before we arrive at the retreat.

As I started putting my plan together to capture all the momentum I was feeling, one of the first questions that popped into my head was how am I going to keep up with my Substack if I’m committed to writing this book? The immediate next thought was why don’t I just make this a part of my Substack?

And so, I’m taking a page out of my friend, ’s, book and experimenting with a weekly-ish “standup,” sharing out updates on my creative process each week.

I’m excited (and admittedly, a little terrified) about the prospect of writing this book in public. I’m inspired by how meaningful it was to join this week as she kicked off her six-week deep-research an article with me workshop series. It blew my mind how enlightening it is to observe someone else’s research and writing process. I left the workshop buzzing with ways to overhaul my research process, namely the way that I collect my notes.

I’ve always taken book and essay notes linearly — my notes left to die in my highlight graveyard, never to be seen again. Elle, on the other hand, sprinkles the quotes that inspire her through the various draft documents she keeps for each topic until she’s ready to write about it. Revolutionary.

After the workshop, I restructured my existing draft system and set up a lightweight process to manage my research going forward — in a way that finally excites me to read and collect more highlights. Incredible how illuminating 90 minutes of observing Elle’s process was.

Perhaps this window into how I make sense of my own process will serve as some inspiration for a few of you who are thinking about taking the leap on your own creative projects. At the very least, this will be a fun way to keep me organized and scrapbook my journey of writing my first book.

Part of what I hope this project inspires is the notion that we can simply have an idea for a big project and do it. This is one big act of fuck around and find out.

This time around, it all feels more easeful and energizing rather than terrifying and daunting. (Okay, maybe except for the part where I leave the garage door up).

To make it a bit more palatable, I’m going to open up the process to my inner ring of paid supporters. I’ve been struggling to figure out what type of experience I want to offer my paid readers and this feels like a fun peek into the raw and messy aspects of my writing process. These updates will be informal and meandering — a departure from my typical musings and essays which I’ll continue writing in parallel.

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Here’s a sampling of the type of update I intend to share:

✅ Decisions made & actions taken this week:

• Confirmed book retreat: we’ve nailed down the date and are in the final stages of booking the Airbnb

  • Putting this retreat on the calendar was the stake in the ground I needed to tell myself: IT’S HAPPENING

• Created a weekly plan: we’ve got 7 weeks until our retreat — from there, I worked backwards and drafted up a weekly plan for what I wanted to get done between now and then to arrive with a first draft

  • Nothing gets me more psyched for a project than a good organized plan

• Consolidated all my notes: for the last year, my notes for the book have been littered across Notion, Obsidian, Substack, Readwise, and my journals

  • Centralizing all my notes into one doc and now knowing where they all live freed up a lot of mental capacity to begin parsing through them

• Decided on Google Docs for book writing: I’ve been blocked on truly starting this project because I kept going back and forth on all the different tools I could use

  • After texting a few author friends for advice and learning how good at formatting Google Docs has gotten in the last year, I finally just made the commitment to use Google Docs for this process

• Brain dump all the questions I have about this process: the random questions I had about how this could go had been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth and kept me from starting the project — by brain dumping everything, it freed up my capacity to actually get to the answers vs swim in the questions

  1. How will I fit book writing into my current writing & research schedule?

  2. Where are all my existing notes scattered?

  3. What tools do I want to use in this process?

  4. What’s actually feasible for the next 7 weeks?

📹 A behind-the-scenes paper trail of my progress from the past week:

At this point, I’ve arrived at enough answers and structure that I’m ready to just do the damn thing and write the messy first draft.

If you enjoy my writing and are interested in this project, I’d be honored if you join me for the ride :)

Upgrade for $6/month

Have a friend who would enjoy following this project?

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Until next week!

This essay is part of the Human AIgency series where I’m investigating how we become more human in the age of AI.

For years, I’ve been haunted by a recurring dream. Each time it played out, I’d wake up disoriented, grasping for meaning, wondering why this unsettling loop kept presenting itself. At first, I dismissed it as an ungrounded fear, but as the dream persisted, I began to wonder, what if this dream wasn’t random? What if it was somehow a missive of wisdom dispatched from the depths of my unconscious?

For centuries, dreams have been a source of mystery, interpreted as divine omens and psychological clues. Carl Jung, the pioneer of analytical psychology, believed that dreams are expressions of the unconscious — symbols revealing truths that we’re not yet ready to face. These messages arrive in our dreams in the form of archetypal symbols and personal associations. Our dreams, it turns out, are rarely as straightforward as they seem.

Historically, we’ve relied on intuition, myth, and psychology to decipher our dreams, but now, for the first time, technology offers us a new way to decode these messages. Artificial intelligence, with its ability to recognize patterns and draw connections between symbols, invites us into a dialogue with our unconscious selves. With the right approach, AI can serve as an interlocutor, helping us tune in more deeply to the parts of ourselves that linger just beneath the surface of our awareness.

In the dream, I found myself in the driver’s seat of a car, driving to an unknown destination. The landscape varied — sometimes, I drove along the roads of my hometown, routes I’d known for years. Other times, I’d find myself navigating an unfamiliar city. I was often in the car alone and always with an unsettled feeling that something was about to go wrong.

As the scene unfolded, it became increasingly challenging to control the car. Suddenly, right before the dream ended, the car would speed up. I’d lose control of the wheel as I exited a highway or drove toward a ditch on the side of the road that appeared moments before. The dream never played out long enough for me to experience the impact of the crash.

For years, this dream replayed over and over again — each time, I woke up unnerved by the recurring feeling of spinning out of control. Eventually, I chalked it up to a fear of driving, the result of years of city living where I’d stopped driving.

A few years ago, during a coaching session, my somatic coach offhandedly mentioned that she used to have a recurring dream of her mom erratically driving her car while she sat powerless in the passenger seat. Often, her dog would get thrown out of the backseat as her mom tore through the streets.

My jaw dropped as she shared what the dream had represented. Growing up, she often lived in fear of her mom, deferring to her mom for big and small decisions. Metaphorically, her mom sat in the driver seat of her life, calling the shots — and it didn’t make for a smooth ride. Her dog represented her natural instincts which rode backseat. The act of getting thrown from the car symbolized a loss of that protective intuition in moments of chaos.

Her story prompted me to explore the significance of my own recurring car dream. As I unraveled the dream, I learned that, in Jungian dream psychology, cars represent how we move through our (psychological) world. They often represent our ego and the conscious self that navigates daily life.

• Sitting in the driver’s seat meant that I felt in control of my own life

• Being alone in the car represented a feeling of independence or isolation

• A speeding car represented an anxiety of keeping pace or a fear of falling behind

• Losing control of the car right before an accident represented a fear of powerlessness as I watch life spiral out of control

As I recalled the times when this particular dream presented itself, it was often during a season of life when I was overwhelmed and felt things spinning out of control — whether I had a big decision to make or felt under water at work. Incredibly, all of these symbols reflected my state of mind with remarkable accuracy.

This was my first introduction to Jungian dream psychology.

The stories that emerge while we’re asleep often bear the precise wisdom we’re seeking in our waking lives, revealing parts of ourselves we may fear confronting. Rather than taking our dreams at face value, we can delve into their deeper layers to uncover their true significance.

Jung developed theories around archetypes that serve as universal symbols and patterns across cultures and time. Some common symbols that emerge in our dreams are our teeth falling out, encountering a snake, being unprepared for an exam or a meeting, showing up somewhere naked, or being chased.

The exploration in interpreting our dreams is becoming increasingly more accessible as new AI models are being released. With the right prompting, we can begin to translate the messages our unconscious minds are delivering us each night.

The process begins with recall — remembering details of our dreams: a skill we can cultivate through practice and attention, training ourselves to hold onto the storylines that emerged overnight before they slip into the abyss.

As we learn to orient ourselves to the inner workings of our dreams, we begin to identify recurring symbols and patterns. While some symbols may carry universal meaning, others hold meaningful personal significance. It’s in the space between universal archetypes and personal associations where meaningful dream interpretation lies — each dream is a conversation with our unconscious selves and an opportunity to transform cryptic messages into pearls of insight.

ChatGPT: pretend you’re a world-class Jungian dream psychologist

I came across Jungian dreamwork in 2023. Around this time, AI models and AI-powered apps were just starting to become widely available to the general public. By the end of the year, I’d logged my first few dreamwork interactions with ChatGPT.

Over the last year, I’ve refined my process, experimenting with different prompts and varying levels of specificity.

Recalling the message

Despite being an avid dreamer, the details of my dreams often disappear the moment I wake up. I’ll have a feeling that I’ve had a meaningful dream, but can’t quite put my finger on what it was. To help jog my memory, I started keeping a notebook by my bed to document the snippets I do remember in as much detail as possible. For example: this morning, I woke up confused about the dream I’d just had except I couldn’t actually remember what had transpired. The only thing I remembered was that there was a scene where I was changing the background on my phone over and over again.

Some questions to contemplate: What was the scene? Who is present? How do you feel? Are there any recurring patterns or symbols? How does the scene interact with what’s happening in your waking life?

Once I’ve noted the details I remember, I’ll engage in low stimulus activities like meditating, doing the dishes, or starting the laundry to create spaciousness for my mind to wander back to the dream on its own time. As soon as I started doing the dishes this morning, my dream from last night resurfaced as if it’d never left my consciousness.

I’ve found that my dreams are more potent the evenings following a bodywork or somatic coaching session — after I’ve consciously grappled with particularly emotionally charged content in my life. It’s my mind’s way of closing the loop on what I’ve drudged up and processing it at the unconscious level.

After reviewing the contents of your dream and reflecting on the emotions that came up, this is where ChatGPT comes in. Of the existing AI models, I’ve found ChatGPT to be the most comprehensive and nuanced in analyzing dreams.

Communicating the message

Curious about AI’s interpretative power, I started feeding my dreams into ChatGPT. At first, my prompts were simple requests to interpret my latest dream:

Over time, I found that the more context I can share on what’s happening in my life, the better the insights. I’ve come to prefer a stream-of-conscious account of the dream. Now, I typically use the voice function to capture the breadth of what unfolded. Voice dictation is particularly helpful when I feel unsettled by a dream or there’s a lot of nuance to capture. I’ve crafted standard ways to frame the ask, often sharing additional context around the circumstances I’m grappling with in my daily life. I remix prompts and will occasionally share snippets of longer journal entries to be analyzed.

Here’s a stream-of-conscious example from this morning:

And boy, did this morning’s analysis deliver.

If you’re relatively new to dreamwork, here are a few prompts to experiment with:

Pretend you’re a world-class Jungian dream psychologist. Please help me analyze and decode the dream I had last night. Provide at least three different interpretations of the dream, focusing on the mythopoetic meanings that aren’t obvious from a cursory read of the dream. Help me break down the different symbols in the dream with an eye toward more symbolic interpretation.

If you need more detail, ask me for more detail and share the reason you want those particular details.

I have a recurring dream where [xyz happens].

I feel [xyz emotion] during the dream, often unsettled by [xyz symbol].

As a Jungian dream analyst, can you help me break down its main symbols and emotions? What might this represent in my unconscious?

I had a dream where I spoke to [xyz person or figure]. As a Jungian dream psychologist, can you guide me through an active imagination exercise to interact with the figure I saw in the dream?

How can I integrate the wisdom of this dream into my relationships and daily life? What might this dream be asking me to do in my waking life?

Looking back at my recent dreams, are there any overarching themes or patterns I ought to focus on?

During the AI for Inner Work salon I recently co-hosted, someone raised a concern that we risk outsourcing our self-awareness when we rely on AI to deliver insights about our inner world rather than coming to those conclusions ourselves. It’s a valid point. But perhaps it’s not always about how we arrive at clarity, but simply that we arrive at it.

Using AI to explore our dreams isn’t about surrendering our intuition, it’s about sharpening it. The real work isn’t in the interpretation, but in discerning what resonates with us then transforming those insights into deeper self-awareness. It’s an act of summoning our agency to explore our unconscious mind.

For years, deciphering my dreams felt like navigating uncharted territory in the dark. AI hasn’t redrawn the map — it’s simply handed me a flashlight, revealing the paths that were always there, waiting to be traversed.

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I’d love to hear about the recurring dreams that visit you or ways that you’re using AI for dreamwork analysis. Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

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If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like:

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.

Last fall, I returned to academia to study the psychology of human flourishing and agency. It had been 10 years since I graduated from college and I’d blissfully forgotten the intensity that comes with committing yourself to an academic institution. The force with which the program consumed me took me by surprise.

I kept pace with my prior publishing schedule through October, made some declarations about experiments I was planning to run with this Substack, then promptly got swept up by my scholarly pursuits. By the time November rolled around, the weekly theory papers I was writing and stacks of research papers I was pouring over caught up to me. I had no energy left to write this newsletter. I felt the gnawing discomfort of straying from my word and a desire to return to what felt comfortable — and yet, another part of me yearned to deepen my authority in a new frame of writing.

In writing this Substack, I’d found my way in crafting creative nonfiction and memoir narratives, but increasingly, I felt drawn to write with more intellectual rigor, exploring ideas that piqued my personal curiosity and were grounded in empirical research. One of the main reasons I’d decided to pursue a masters in applied positive psychology was to hone my ability to weave together the philosophical with the experiential and pressure test my ideas in an academic setting.

14 academic papers later, I’m ready to dig into the big questions I’ve been mulling over. As for school: with my maternal grandmother’s decline in health, I’m taking a leave of absence this spring to free up my time to travel between the US and China to be with her as she nears end of life.

With some spaciousness from Penn and renewed energy, my intention for writing this year is to harvest my learnings from the last semester, evolve my relationship with this Substack, and actually experiment with new forms of writing. In this iteration, think: more Aristotelian friends-type pieces.

The first experiment I’m excited to run is a series call Human AIgency, an investigation into human agency in the age of AI. I’m expecting this exploration to take shape in the form of essays, practical field notes, and conversations with builders and thinkers.

Agency is the embodied conviction that we have the power to create change in our lives and transform our visions into reality. In a paper examining agency through the lens of Greco-Roman philosophy, Martin Seligman — the father of positive psychology — argues that during periods throughout history when agency lies in the hands of gods, human progress stagnates. When agency extends from the divine to humankind, progress across the board — from economic to technological to political — ushers in eras of great flourishing. Individual agency is the engine that powers human progress, driving societies forward.

In the literature, the state of agency is defined as the amalgamation of three psychological conditions: self-efficacy, optimism, and imagination.

• Self-efficacy: the belief we can achieve a specific goal now

• Optimism: the belief that we can achieve that goal in the future

• Imagination: the belief we can achieve a variety of goals we set our mind to

After studying the arc of human flourishing and agency through millennia — from ancient philosophical texts to modern psychology research, I’m wrestling with these pressing questions:

• What does it mean to live well and become more human in the age of AI? How do we do it?

• How does the rise of AI impact our sense of agency? In what ways can we become more agentic?

• Will AI free us up to self-actualize or edge us closer to a full-blown meaning crisis?

• How do our relationships with AI bode for our human relationships?

• Can we use AI to become more emotionally and socially intelligent?

These questions were at the heart of an AI for Inner Work salon I co-hosted last week. As the group shared notes on their favorite ways to leverage AI practically, we covered a wide swath of use cases — from using voice AIs to get closure after a messy breakup to making sense of unconscious thoughts by analyzing patterns in recurring dreams to sharing years of journal entries to converse with our younger selves. And that was just in the emotional work space.

The pace of change in AI is accelerating at dizzying speeds. Just two years ago, interacting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT felt revolutionary — like a glimpse into the future. Now, it’s just one among a growing constellation of advanced models — Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and X’s Grok — redefining the boundaries of possibility. These AIs paint new worlds with simple text prompts, solve PhD-level problems with the flick of a wrist, and autonomously navigate the streets of San Francisco. Each new release is more groundbreaking than the last.

Earlier this week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic gestured toward our not-too-distant arrival at a reality where AI capabilities surpass human abilities across nearly every domain. The future is unfolding before our eyes.

In this moment of time, we’re edging toward a new manifestation of the divine — an intelligence that approaches omniscience and omnipotence, not through supernatural creation, but through the technological evolution of knowledge and capability.

If history were to repeat itself, our greatest challenge will be finding the right balance between human and artificial (i.e., divine) intelligence. Without the proper safeguards, we risk not just a conscious delegation of agency following in the steps of ancient civilizations and their gods, but an unconscious surrender to a technology whose power we can’t fully comprehend. Unlike the gradual and incremental shifts in agency of the past, the relationship humanity forms with AI can reshape human behavior within a single generation.

To subvert this risk, it’s incumbent on us to take a step back and reflect on the humans we want to be and the lives we want to lead in this era, deliberately directing AI to free us up to engage with our art in the broadest sense and cultivate rich lives.

As AI becomes increasingly central to our daily lives, Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, serves as a compass in guiding us toward harnessing our inner wisdom. Phronesis — the unifying virtue that coordinates and directs all other virtues — empowers us in discerning the right decision, at the right time, for the right reasons. In moments when it’s tempting to outsource our intuition to a sycophant AI, eager to please and reinforce our biases, phronesis calls us back inward, urging us to reclaim our agency.

I’m excited to experiment with this series in pursuit of helping us become more human in an increasingly AI-reliant world and finding ways to bridge the philosophical with the practical.

I’d love to hear what questions you’re grappling with or the ways you’re using AI in your daily life in the comments or say hi on Twitter!

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If this series resonates, you may enjoy some prior musings on our relationship with AI & technology:

Or consider sharing this newsletter with a friend :)

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Thanks to Ryan, , and for their feedback on drafts of this essay.

Last fall, I stepped into the General Manager role at The Commons, a community space dedicated to meaning-making and self-expression in the heart of San Francisco. The last few months have been filled with experiments and lessons in what it takes to operate a physical space, meet the needs of our members, sustain the business financially, and deliver on our mission of supporting people on their journey in becoming more themselves.

In addition to nurturing our member-designed programming, we also piloted a new experience called Town Square where we partnered with values-aligned practitioners, writers, builders, and civic leaders who are pushing the boundaries of intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and civic development. Our events took shape in the form of fireside chats, book launches, and dharma talk series.

In an increasingly polarized world, the opportunity to welcome leaders across domains and open our doors to the public felt like a breath of fresh air. There are fewer and fewer spaces where we experience the cross-section of humanity. Our remaining public spaces — parks, libraries, transit systems, DMVs — fall short of dignifying our shared humanity. As private social clubs crop up across the nation to combat the loneliness crisis, this project seeks to answer a different, more pressing question: what’s the meaning of it all?

As the new year rolled in, our team returned the drawing board to ponder this question, assess the state of The Commons, and determine where we’re headed. We found ourselves wondering: how can we orient our mission toward creating space for people of all walks of life to coexist, setting aside our differences — if only briefly — to honor our shared human existence?

Since its inception, The Commons has served as an experiential lab for our community, poking at what it takes to safely lose ourselves in the company of others on a similar pursuit, to cultivate Aristotelian friendships, to walk the path toward psychological flourishing, to create spaciousness to slow down, to loosen the grip on our traditional identities, and to playfully experiment with multiple dimensions of ourselves. A place to be ourselves and to become ourselves.

In returning to first principles, we acknowledged that we had strayed from our initial vision of serving as a place to sense make in community, devolving more into a private social and coworking club than a community living room.

With renewed energy, we’re excited to usher in a new era of The Commons — one where we’re contemplating:

• How do we bridge the experience of playful co-working by day and vibrant community meeting house by night?

• What will it take to drive cultural change and usher in new ways of working and playing, offering alternatives to hustle culture and the pervasive bar scene in the form of pursuing work from a place of aliveness and conscious partying with a good book?

• What are the structural conditions needed to seed a culture of individual and collective agency within the space?

• How do we cultivate a place of serendipity and aliveness where evenings can be spent playing a pick-up board game next to a circle in the depths of debating the impact of AI on inner work and humanity?

• How can we sustain this project culturally and financially over the long term and pioneer new business models rooted in healing and self-actualization?

We’re nearly three years in and this is just the beginning. As we continue to experiment with the bounds of what’s possible, we’re guided by the reality that this project is a living, breathing entity, nurtured by the collective wisdom of our community.

The following essay was originally published to .

Where we’ve been 🔮

It’s been nearly three years since The Commons opened its doors in San Francisco. What began as a brainstorm amongst 50 friends for a community living room in the Hayes-Alamo area quickly evolved into a GoFundMe campaign, securing a space at 540/550 Laguna St, and a collective effort by hundreds of friends who built furniture, painted murals, and seeded their hopes for a new kind of community third space.

Together, we co-created a place that harkened back to the feeling of unbounded exploration and curiosity in our formative years: volleying deep questions in a college common room until 2am, mind-melding on beautiful futures that haven’t quite arrived, and communing with diverse, pluralistic, and contradicting perspectives with authentic openness and curiosity. One that could address the growing void in America’s social and "meaning-making" infrastructure left by the decline of churches, clubs, and community spaces.

Thousands of community-created book clubs, juntos, discussion circles, jams, philosophy salons, and workshops later, it's become evident there’s a deeper nexus of phenomena underlying the growth of the space.

The desire to make friends: an effort to mend a fragmented social fabric as urbanites.

The diverse discussions: a need to bring coherence to a dizzying world devoid of overarching order.

From paint nights to writing clubs — a thirst to nurture seedlings of our most authentic selves.

The plethora of co-created programming across the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional — a primordial yearning for wholeness.

The invitation to show up as humans unsure of much — the antidote to all the places in adult life that insist on firm identities.

Not quite a traditional third space, networking social club, secular church, or recreation center — what we are is still emergent and a constantly evolving community experiment (that we’ve loosely defined as a “fourth place”).

Nonetheless, our mission has remained constant: to support people in the process of becoming more fully themselves, rooted in the belief that community is essential to that journey. And to do that in a space infused with playfulness, aliveness, agency, earnestness, abundance, and kindness.

Our next iteration 🔭

Stepping into the new year, we’re excited to share our latest evolution in The Commons’ unfolding toward realizing our mission.

TL;DR: The Commons is evolving from an intimate experimental community into a true “Commons”— a playful co-working space by day that transforms into a vibrant community meeting house by night.

• 🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership

• ☀️ By day (9am-5pm), we’re creating a new category of playful co-working that is pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing

• 🌔 By evening (5-10pm), we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House, retaining the heart of our member-created programming while welcoming in more public programming and broader community leaders

• 🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying

• Join us in this new chapter 🎉

🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership

To date, The Commons has functioned more as an intimate community than a porous or open one — an intentional choice. However, going forward we’re hoping to increasingly materialize a true “Commons.”

In their early stages, new communities and institutions are inherently fragile, and we prioritized cultivating our culture at a thoughtful, measured pace. This approach allowed us to experiment with programming formats and find the balance between our vision for the space and the emergent, dynamic needs of the community through each iteration.

Today, we believe the reputation and values The Commons represents have grown robust enough to stand independently. Our experiments with programming have also provided valuable insights into the infrastructure and experiments we’d like to run to fully and continuously realize those values.

As an aspiring pluralistic space for self and communal meaning-making, we also want to increasingly invite diverse life experiences, ages, life stages, political views, and ways of being and becoming. Due to the initial network effect of some of our founding cohorts, we veered towards millennial / gen-z age groups in tech and tech-adjacent industries.

Going forward, we’d like to increasingly move towards a true “town square” and more open institution where San Francisco citizens can commune across dichotomies. In today’s climate of dogmatism and division, what’s needed are less private social clubs (the direction we were going down via inertia) and more spaces that cohere people across differences while uniting under core humanistic values.

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• Broadening membership acceptance: We’ll be accepting more applicants to The Commons given the institutional stability the Commons has created in the last 3 years. With more members, we’ll be ensuring each member still embodies our core values of abundance, agency, kindness, earnestness, and play.

• Expanding public and centrally organized programming in the evenings: In our first 3 years of operations, most of our events were hosted by members for members. Going forward, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to create our evening Community Meeting House atmosphere. We’ll also be increasing our evening public programming featuring values-aligned practitioners, writers, creators, and builders across domains who are pushing the boundaries of spiritual, emotional, intellectual, creative, and civic development. Members will receive prioritized access and discounted tickets to these events.

The Commons membership experience:
☀️ By day, we’re creating a new category of playful co-working
🌔 By evening, we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” ― Ian McEwan

With this quote as inspiration, we thought to ourselves: How do we create more of these kinds of days at The Commons?

By day, we will be a vibrant neighborhood hub of creative and playful co-working with new and old friends, where the lines blur between “doing” work, mind-melding with others, and simply “being.” We’re for the days where you may have fewer calls, want more creative stimulation, have IRL coffee chats in one of our cozy nooks, or want to take walking calls around the heart of Hayes Valley. At the same time, if you’re looking to be heads down and focused, you are always welcome to carve out your own flow. We’re not here to force serendipity—just to make sure it has a home for those who want it. If some days you want deep focus, The Commons still fully supports that, with plenty of spaces to settle in and immerse yourself in your craft.

The kind of “work days” that are pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing: meditating mid work-day in our Moroccan lounge, perusing a book for inspiration in our community library, doodling at our art supply station, or striking up a serendipitous conversation while making tea. This is an intentional departure away from the grind-set, remote, and white-knuckled hustle culture that pervades American work culture. At the same time, we also recognize that not every day is the same. Some days are for head-down execution, and others are for spontaneous creativity. The Commons is designed to hold both—so that whether you’re here to laser-focus on a deadline or open yourself up to unexpected encounters, you have the space to do so with intention.

In essence, we want to bring back and reinvent the “watercooler culture” that made work connective and human. In that vein, we’re ushering in a new era of healing and re-defining our relationship to work — one that is flowy, expansive, and holistic.

By night, we transition into an enlivening community meeting house. “Work” as defined by being an artist and doing our art (in the broadest sense) then evolves into communal sense-making. Where the conversations we have in community become mirrors and edifices for self-reflection and expansion, allowing us to show up more authentically in our creations and worldly endeavors. The Commons, by night, is about expansion in whatever form that takes—whether it's engaging in a lively discussion or quietly sketching ideas sparked by the energy around you.

The evening will be enlivened with numerous members only and public events running all at once; for members, we’ll continue to have philosophy salons, board game nights, recurring social rituals, potlucks, and numerous ways to reflect, commune, and explore as a community.

For more public programming: What would it mean to invert the “retreat model”? Instead of going out of town or to disparate institutions to seek wisdom, The Commons becomes a nexus for “elders” to share ideas. A top of funnel function where intros to spiritual traditions, civic matters, philosophical ideas, forms of art, etc. can be shared with the public in a buffet-like fashion. If the intros warrant deeper inquiry, people can then go directly to that elder or institution afterwards. In other words, a node that aggregates energy and then disperses it. Rather than a place of passive consumption, The Commons can be a generative threshold.

In the Fall, we did a v1 of this by hosting over 30+ salons featuring people like Mayor London Breed, Noah Smith, Joe Hudson, Paul Millerd, Gena Gorlin, and Luna Ray. In 2025, we’re hoping to curate a fantastic lineup of new elders embodying “novel ways of being and doing,” offering fresh perspectives on how we live, work, and connect.

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• Enhancing our co-working spaces: We’re adding a new tea station, an art-making area, and space affordances designed to spark serendipitous conversations along with other playful upgrades.

• Experimenting with playful work affordances: We’ll be experimenting with novel forms of social infrastructure to encourage serendipity and connection during co-working days (i.e. informal lunch squads, “watercooler” prompts, activity breaks, playful stand-ups, etc)

• Balancing member-led and organizational programming: While we’ll continue to support members with resources and space for their events, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to support more public events to create our Community Meeting House atmosphere.

🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying

There’s been a subtle but steady shift in the public consciousness towards desiring new forms of evening activities that go beyond the typical excursion to a restaurant, bar, movie night, or club to meet others or convene with loved ones. With a recent warning put out by the US Surgeon General that even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer, the current alcohol-driven culture of nightlife is rife to go through a huge upending.

What kinds of evening social and physical infrastructure will be created in the wake of this? How can we use different means to meet the same needs for self-connection and connection with others?

We believe now is the time to experiment with novel forms of evening activities: from late night decaf tea houses, evening bathhouses, no-alc dance parties, reading parties, game board parlors to cozy cafes that close at 2am. The Commons is hoping to be at the forefront of this experimentation, opening our space for evening programming that is connective, conscious, and wholesome (with the aims of opening a late night tea house sometime in the future 😉🤫).

Here are the changes we’re implementing:

• More non-alc evening activity experimentation: Expect more experimental evening programming like silent reading nights, analog write-a-thons, powerpoint parties, and rabbit-hole-a-thons.

• Keeping our doors open until 10pm: Most coffee shops close at 5pm and non-alch spaces that are open late are far and wide in between. We plan on keeping our doors open after public / member events end until 10pm so you can continue the discussions into the night.

We’re excited to usher in this new evolution of The Commons’ journey and hope you’ll join us for the ride.

• We’ll be opening our member applications to join our space in Febuary: apply by Wednesday, Febuary 5th, 2025

• Check out our public programming calendar (new events are still in process of being announced & will drop in Feb) + subscribe to our Substack to get updates

• Follow us on Twitter for more updates and good vibes

Warmly,

The Commons Team

The universe delivers us lessons when we’re ready to receive them. These lessons often manifest as internal struggle, triggered by interpersonal conflict, uncertainty surrounding consequential decisions, or existential doubts. A lesson may present itself in new ways, over and over again — it’s only when we’re open to healing an old wound that we can learn what it has to teach us.

2024 delivered me a series of lessons, revealing the ways that I wasn’t yet free. New paradigms I’d stepped into and old dynamics that were ready to be unraveled.

A lesson that had presented itself daily finally came into my awareness: the way I was pursuing aliveness was depleting me.

My search for aliveness has long been tethered to my search for meaningful work. I sought inspiration and aliveness through my work and considered enjoyable activities that took me away from my desk as a reward: an experience to be earned. After I finish this essay. After I send this email. After I wrap this project proposal.

After diversifying my core identity away from a traditional career, I entered a season of life where I filled my days with projects I cared deeply about: writing, studying applied positive psychology, and building The Commons. Work continued to function as my primary vehicle for meaning, becoming deeply entangled with my acts of self-expression. Work that once served as my vessel for creative expression became burdened by the pressure to consistently produce and manufacture meaning. It all had to mean something.

As the lines between work and self-expression blurred, my productivity and desire to create waned under the mounting demands of output and financial sustainability. Although I’d set fire to old scripts, I’d subconsciously began operating from new scripts.

As I’d peeled back the layers of societal conditioning, I came into contact with more of myself — a purer version of who I was underneath all the external shoulds. The trouble was that I hadn’t yet learned that the nature of turning inward is that the shoulds become more and more subtle. As aspects of my life came into alignment, other more subtle shoulds revealed themselves.

The reality that my new portfolio of work had awakened states of aliveness and flow in me spawned a new belief: that work really should be my main source of meaning. As these new scripts quietly took root, they co-opted the progress I’d made in expanding my identity.

At year’s end, when I looked back on the moments I felt most alive, a different truth emerged: it wasn’t the days I spent cranking away at my desk, but the moments I was moving my body, connecting with family and friends, or adventuring in nature. My best days consisted of deep flowy work sessions and awe-inspiring moments with people I love.

Those days, I came to my desk inspired and motivated, dancing toward purposefulness. It all felt inevitable. Yet, for as many days the flow just flowed, there were twice as many days when I forcibly willed myself to dance when no music played.

Despite the fact that the days I spent grinding away all blurred together, I couldn’t shake the notion that meaningful work came above all else.

Clarity arrived in an unexpected way in December: on an emergency family trip. I flew out to Beijing with my mom and brother to be with my grandmother after she was admitted to the ICU. I was amidst finals season at school and yet, I knew with every fiber of my being that I needed to be in Beijing. Despite being jetlagged and grappling with the reality of my grandmother nearing end of life, I found brief moments of flow writing papers in the afternoons, nestled between mornings spent connecting with my mom and brother and late afternoon trips to the hospital. (Fittingly, my final papers investigated what it means to live a meaningful life.)

Back at home, when I suppressed my desire to be inspired and connected, I inevitably operated from disconnection. Yet, self-expression and creativity flow as a byproduct of harnessing possibility and wonder in our lives. Our best work rarely emerges when we’re deprioritizing our bodies and souls. By putting work and self-expression above all else, I closed myself off to drawing inspiration from other areas of my life.

As a result of shaking up my daily routine, I saw the new paradigm I’d trapped myself in with clear eyes. This self-imposed constraint was a defense mechanism that had protected me in an old paradigm.

After a career of early morning meetings, I became fiercely protective of my mornings. When I finally made my schedule my own, I found it deeply nourishing to reserve my mornings for meditating, journaling, and writing. I basked in the morning stillness. Slowly, I pushed my “morning” hours further and further into the day. I became militant about no “distractions” until early afternoon. The restrictions I once needed to recover from having no time to myself expanded to constrain the rest of my day. What was meant to create space and flow became rigid and stifling.

I convinced myself that all my days needed to start a certain way and resisted new ways my day could unfold. When exciting opportunities arose—an interesting call, a new workout class—I clenched to what “worked.”

As I clung to preserving my morning hours, it became clear that the rigidity was contributing to states of contraction. When I held the desire to dedicate the morning to writing and being alone too tightly, I missed signs from my body that were whispering: I’m being deprived of inspiration. I want to work out. I’d prefer to go out for a walk and see what words emerge.

When we’re too precious about maintaining the constraints we’ve set for ourselves, we ignore our intuition and fail to cultivate the self-trust needed to free ourselves from over-optimizing.

The irony of optimizing our lives is that the nature of optimization is rooted in a lack of self-trust. We inherently don’t trust ourselves so we put systems in place to take the thought out of it. While setting constraints is a good short-term solution in bridging our self-trust gap, the ultimate goal is to build a reserve of self-kept promises that help us restore faith in our intuition rather than further optimize a system that keeps us caged.

My morning ritual took shape during a global lockdown when I was checking my phone every few minutes. Now, I no longer have the impulse to check my texts hundreds of times a day — as a result, I no longer need to hold myself back from the desire to take a break after a deep work session to connect with a friend. There’s a difference between following an impulse to procrastinate versus a genuine desire to connect meaningfully.

This year, I’m cultivating moments of wonder and seeking aliveness through moving my body, spending time with people I love, and being in nature, allowing the overflow to spill into my work and self-expression rather than grind on empty.

What lessons did you learn in 2024? What intentions are guiding you this year?

Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

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Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.

In a bout of homesickness over the summer, I booked a flight home to spend Thanksgiving with my family solo for the first time in a while. It’d been over a year since I’d been home and all of our family time in recent memory was spent with my husband, Ryan.

When I was younger, I feared bringing home a partner who came from a seemingly functional family. I was ashamed of the ways I interacted with my parents — the fights that broke out, the frustration I felt with them. Back then, I had neither experienced the level of emotional safety with a partner that I feel with Ryan nor had the recognition that our family dynamic was quite ordinary for a Chinese American family. A generational divide mired with cultural nuances that we weren’t equipped to handle.

Turns out, being in a partnership with someone you feel deeply secure with and speaking truth to once embarrassingly shameful experiences makes way for repatterning old dynamics.

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Over the years, he’s become my emotional security blanket of sorts, lowering the temperature of our family dynamics — approaching disagreements with openness and a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. I’ve come to treasure his relationship with my parents. Their interactions have served as a reference point for me that things can be different. By not being burdened by our old dynamics, he can cultivate levels of empathy and patience I’ve struggled to do my entire life.

And yet in the safety and comfort of his presence, I’ve found myself avoiding spending too much time with my parents without him — perhaps a subconscious lack of faith that I can trust fall into the arms of all the inner work I’ve done to resource myself.

And so during the cross-country flight home, I contemplated how I wanted to show up for my week at home. After a meaningful family trip to China in April, I knew that it was possible to coexist peacefully. For me, the easefulness of our trip was in large thanks to the clarity I found in what boundaries I needed to set and uphold throughout the two weeks together.

In preparation for the time at home, I meditated on a few similar intentions:

• Cultivate morning stillness: in the absence of grounding myself with a meditation and journaling first thing in the morning, I find my days devolve into reactivity

• Move my body: get out of my head and into the world every day

• Communicate my schedule upfront: I find it’s easier to honor alone time if I’m clear about my intentions for the day and set expectations of when I’m available to spend time together

• Reset my body on east coast time and head to bed early: grumpy me tends to arrive after 10pm

It’s taken me years to understand precisely what I need to do to resource myself and create the conditions to show up with my parents in a way I’m most proud.

The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

As is now tradition, I spend the weeks before seeing my family grounding myself into states of presence. Before this trip, I sat a meditation retreat and did boundary work. Before our trip to China in April, I similarly sat a meditation retreat to remind myself the impermanence of it all.

I recognize that I won’t always have the spaciousness to go on a meditation retreat before seeing my parents (as was the case last week when we traveled to Beijing last minute to be with my grandmother who was admitted into the ICU). But with time, I’ll no longer need to prepare myself so intently. So long as I uphold the boundaries I need to feel like myself, I can draw strength from the reference points I’ve created with them of the way things can be, surrendering memories of how things once were.

In Chinese, there's no equivalent term for personal boundaries. Boundaries (分界线 and 边界) are defined as dividing lines and borders. The lack of a notion around relational boundaries makes sense when you understand the history of China — families of four sharing a studio apartment, roommates of eight sharing a dorm room. There was no space for boundaries when you’re trying to survive.

Many of the negative interactions throughout our lifetime together has been the result of boundaries being crossed and misaligned expressions of love. My parents attempting to convey their love for me in a way that’s missed the mark with my love language and vice versa.

It’s only when I’ve been able to bring awareness to what my needs are that I’ve been able to clearly articulate to them what boundaries I need them to respect. Please knock before coming into my room. Please give me space in the morning to meditate. Please allow me to make my own mistakes so I can learn the lesson my own way. Please trust me so I can trust myself.

In a conversation with my mom, she shared that boundaries can be hard when the human in front of you used to be a baby in diapers. These days, I find myself empathizing with my parents in ways I never imagined because I finally have the spaciousness to ask about their lives, their struggles, their dreams. I can’t imagine how challenging it must have been to raise two children, continuously trying your best to meet their needs at every age, particularly when your own needs as a child weren’t met.

Lately, when I part ways with my parents, I’m haunted by Tim Urban’s The Tail End — a sobering reminder that assuming we spend 10 meaningful days with our parents a year in adulthood, by the time we graduate “from high school, [we have] already used up 93% of [our] in-person parent time. [We’re] now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”

As my parents age and we grapple with the declining health of their parents, I feel a heaviness when I leave them. It’s one last time I’ll see them. This is the reality, tragedy, and joy of growing up and growing old: it becomes increasingly clarifying who and what matter in life as our time on earth together dwindles.

I rest knowing that despite how hard it’s been, all this inner work I’m doing is paving the way for one of my proudest accomplishments: healing my relationship with my parents this lifetime.

As we head into the holiday season, I hope you have a meaningful time with the loved ones you celebrate with and give yourself the grace knowing you’re doing the best you can.

What boundaries are you honoring? What old dynamics are you navigating?

Say hi in the comments or on Twitter / X :)

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If this essay resonated with you, you may also like:

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing a draft of this essay.

Recently, I hosted a Fireside Chat with my friend, , at The Commons in celebration of his new book, Good Work. Paul embodies the spirit of the pathless path and serves as a reference point of what it looks like to break free from a conventionally alluring path in pursuit of his greatest ambitions and aligning with work that matters most to him.

As I read Good Work and prepped for our conversation, I reflected on how my relationship with work continues to evolve and the stories I hold about what it means to do good work.

In the US, it’s common to seek legibility through what we do for work. When we introduce ourselves to strangers, one of the first questions we ask one another is “What do you do?” Not “what do you do” in the sense of how do you spend your time or what curiosities are you chasing, but what’s your role in contributing to our economy? Of all the identities we hold, presenting ourselves as productive workers has become the quickest way for others to gauge who we are and for us to gain approval.

As a result, we derive our self-worth from the titles we hold, the companies we belong to, and the salaries we earn. When so much of our sense of self is tied up in a single identity, it’s easy to feel suffocated by the existential dread that creeps in when what began as a good, meaningful job no longer fuels us.

Paul argues that, as a society, we’ve mistaken securing good jobs for finding meaningful work. Rather than viewing our jobs as the portal to good work, it’s about redefining what work means to us — as acts of self-expression that don’t necessarily bear economic fruit rather than solely as acts of employment.

This isn’t to devalue our employment but rather to disentangle the “good enough” from the truly “good” work. It’s only when we reimagine what work means to us that we can create space to engage in the activities that allow us to flourish and flow.

• Good work: energizing activities that bring us to states of flow — not always easeful, but reliably nourishing

• “Good enough” work: supporting tasks that bring a level of enjoyment, often to help sustain us financially, but not central to our good work

• Supporting work: adjacent tasks that support our good work, but can become a distraction

• “Bad” work: draining work to minimize or avoid, but may be necessary to sustain ourselves financially

Once we have a sense of how each of the activities we engage in fit into these buckets, we can begin to prioritize our energy and time accordingly. In moments of existential dread, we’re likely filling our lives with supporting activities and “bad” work, too depleted to embark on our good work.

finding our good work in the marble

I often hear friends lament that they struggle with identifying what type of work they’d want to do if they had the freedom to do whatever they pleased. Then, they proceed to share a list of meaningful activities they wish they had more time to do.

In my experience, my good work has been surprisingly obvious to me, subtly manifesting as what I do when no one is watching. Once I expanded my definition of work, tapped into my intuition, and created space to experiment, it became abundantly clear that I’ve known what my good work is all along.

When I was in elementary school, I often spent recess writing short stories on the playground with my best friend. As I got older, despite my love for writing, it never occurred to me that I could continue writing even if it wasn’t a “viable” career path.

It took giving myself the permission to write again with no agenda other than self-expression to slip into deep states of flow. Often this feeling is so powerful that when I re-read my essays, I’m met with awe. I know I wrote those words, but I don’t remember how I assembled that sentence or how I arrived at that conclusion. I got lost in the writing and it naturally flowed through me.

The important qualifier is no agenda. When I first started reconnecting with writing, I felt a pressure to grow and monetize in ways that felt misaligned with my purpose for writing. After months of experimentation, I realized it was far more important for me to draw out what felt most alive in me on any given week than commit to a rigid publishing schedule to meet draining growth goals.

Ironically, by giving my relationship with writing space to naturally evolve, I now have far greater (and sustainable) ambitions for writing than I would have by trying to shoehorn it into a profit-making endeavor. Now, writing serves as my vehicle for discovery, expression, and expansion.

I write this coming off several weeks where I struggled to muster the words to piece together an essay. Rather than force myself towards publishing, I gave myself the grace to sit with the discomfort of not having the words, writing and writing until I found flow again.

Your good work exists within the marble slab of experimentation and action, waiting to be revealed. The journey is about patiently chiseling away at the inner and social expectations that keep you from pursuing the work that resonates at the soul level. Allow what doesn’t matter to fall away to make way for what does.

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When you connect with your good work, protect it at all costs. Don’t put pressure on your acts of self-expression by trying to make it your sole source of income. When we buy into the notion that we must spend all of our time and energy doing our most meaningful work, we paralyze ourselves in the search for the perfect thing, ruminating rather than experimenting.

Seek out “good enough'“ and supporting work that afford you time and space to engage in your good work while maintaining the lifestyle you want to live.

The challenge lies not in discovering what our good work is, but in liberating ourselves from the notion that only financially lucrative activities constitute as meaningful work worth doing. Good work recharges our life force, energizes us to connect with our truest ambitions, and serves as our channel to express our humanity to the world.

giving voice to our intuition

All of us have an intuition around what our good work is. The question is whether we’re attuned enough with ourselves to trust that intuition. When we continuously suppress what we want to do in favor of what we should do, it becomes harder to connect with our most genuine desires even when we have the resources to do it.

What do you gravitate towards doing in moments when no one is watching? What came naturally to you as a child?

The best way to unstuck ourselves is to take small steps in cultivating self-trust in the face of “competing” priorities. Rather than thinking about the consequences, take action in building the momentum to figure it out.

Have an inkling to attend the writing event happening tomorrow even though you should work more? Go. Feel drawn to the local pottery class even though you should go to that networking event? Sign up. Contemplating going to the meditation sit even though you should catch up on emails? Meditate.

Evaluate how building self-trust feels in your body. Do you feel lightness or heaviness after acting on your intuition? Each time you honor the quiet whispers that emerge, you strengthen the bridge back to your inner wisdom. Over time, you create reference points of courage that further fuel you towards building a life around the experiences you feel called to.

As we age, the hope is that we gain a progressively deeper understanding of who we’ve been and who we aspire to become. This evolution demands we consciously examine the parts of ourselves that have succumb to societal shoulds. Unshackle yourself from the life you think you should live.

Who are we living and working for if not ourselves?

Here’s to finding your good work. The work you lose yourself in. The work that you do for the sake of it. The work that sets your soul on fire.

Thanks for reading! How do you define your “good work”?

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Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

Watch the replay of our fireside chat:

If you enjoy this piece, you may also enjoy my series on Work & Self-Expression:

Thanks to for leading the way in reimagining our relationship with work, to for reviewing a draft of this essay and filming our discussion, and to everyone who joined us for the fireside chat.