Newsletter Sample -- February 24, 2026
Hi Laura!
A friend mentioned recently that she was waiting on imaging results. Just a routine thing, probably nothing — but that "probably" does its work on you, doesn't it? The waiting. The not knowing. And then, eventually, the answer. We might not always love what we find — but at least we find something.
We have remarkable tools for seeing inside our physical bodies now. Something hurts, something feels off, and within days we can have a picture — a clear, legible map of what's happening beneath the surface. There's an appointment, a report, a path forward. The uncertainty has an end point.
And then I started wondering: where's the equivalent for the low-grade dread you can't quite locate? The sense that something is off but you can't name what? The feeling of moving through your days like you're slightly behind yourself, never quite catching up? There isn't one. Not externally, anyway. And for a long time, we weren't even encouraged to turn inward and trust what we might find there.
The cultural message around emotional and mental struggle has often been some version of just think happy thoughts or don't worry so much — as if anxiety or disconnection were simply a failure of attitude rather than something real worth attending to. Nobody tells someone with knee pain to cheer up and push through. But the inner life? For generations, the default response was essentially: don't be dramatic.
Finding Our Way Through The Fog
Here's the thing — the footing we're looking for was never outside of us. We can find our way back to it.
The practices we've quietly pushed to the margins — slowing down, quieting the mind, sitting with acceptance rather than reaching for control, allowing ourselves to simply be for a moment — these aren't secondary. They're the mechanism. The way we access the wisdom we each already hold within ourselves. The answers are there. The question is simply whether we've kept open the pathways to reach them.
Long before we had machines to tell us what was happening inside our bodies, humans were developing an entirely different kind of inner practice — one that kept surfacing across cultures, traditions, and centuries. Not for diagnosing the body, but for steadying the mind and spirit. And at the heart of nearly all of them was the same deceptively simple discernment: learning to distinguish between what is genuinely yours to carry and what isn't.
That practice, in whatever form it takes, tends to come back to one clarifying question: Is this something that's up to me? Or not?
It sounds almost too simple. But sit with it for a moment. Because that question is itself a form of inner imaging. It helps us see what's actually there — what's genuinely ours — versus what we've absorbed from the noise around us. How much of what we're carrying belongs to someone else's anxiety, someone else's chaos, that quietly took up residence in our own minds and settles there, unexamined?
When we slow down enough to actually tune in — through the practices that restore us, through presence, through those unguarded ordinary moments — we can get a picture. Not as fast as an x-ray. Not handed to us in a report. But real, and often surprisingly accurate.
The space that's genuinely ours — our own attention, our own response, our own inner life — is also the one we were never really taught to tend. Over time, without even noticing, we stopped depending on ourselves for answers and began looking outward instead — to technology, to experts, to the knowledge of others. As if the best answers couldn't possibly live within us.
Silence is not empty. It is full of answers.
~ Unknown
This one I know from experience — not from formal practice or intentional stillness, but from the ordinary unguarded moments. Brushing my teeth. Pulling weeds. Just not thinking specifically about anything. It's in those spaces, when I've stopped struggling for an answer, that answers tend to quietly arrive. Not always as words. Sometimes as images, or just a felt sense of something settling. We don't have to manufacture those moments. We just have to stop filling them.
Living Better: A Two-Minute Witness Practice
The practices that keep us grounded — the ones that restore us and keep us connected to what's real and what's ours — these are what keep us open and receptive. When they're in place, we're more resilient to the chaos. When they quietly erode, which happens so easily when life speeds up, we lose the thread. Not all at once. Gradually. Until one day we realize we're behind ourselves and can't quite remember when that started.
So this week, when you notice that vague sense of unease or that slightly-adrift feeling — before reaching for a distraction, pause for just two minutes. Not to fix anything. Not to analyze. Simply to ask, with genuine curiosity:
What's actually here right now? And is this mine?
What's Nurturing Me Now
An Invitation from Nature: Last week's February thaw is still keeping me warm. Fifty degrees in Minnesota in February is not, I know, an uncomplicated gift — the climate reality isn't lost on me. But after a January of near-zero temperatures and Michelin Man levels of layering just to get to the car, a few days of actually being outside without armor felt like grace. I breathed it in, let the sun do its work, and I'm holding onto that warmth until the next one.
A Simple Pleasure: I watched deer and turkeys recently from the window — completely different creatures, quietly occupying the same warm spot of ground together. It struck me as a gentle reminder that beneath our differences, we're often longing for exactly the same things. They didn't invite me to join them, but I considered it.
Final Thoughts
The fog doesn't clear all at once. But it does clear — a little, and then a little more — when we turn toward it instead of away from it. When we stop waiting for an external report and remember that we already have access to something that works.
That looking, it turns out, is its own kind of imaging. And it's been available to us all along.
Until next time — keep noticing what's yours.
