Relationships: Karmic, Limerence, Dharmic

Shakti and Shiva: The Essence of Dharmic Love

In Hindu philosophy, Shakti and Shiva represent two complete energies uniting as one, the essence of a Dharmic union. Relationships are fundamental to human growth. Our first relationships are usually Karmic. We get into relationships with people who push our buttons or push us to fix and heal something within ourselves that we might not have been aware of. Limerence is an extreme attraction to something. Have you ever had a type that you were attracted to, for example, I was super attracted to the funny guy who was super secure in himself, you might be attracted to artists, and it's because we're projecting what we really desire and actually have within ourselves onto someone else. I also want to talk about historically how women have felt the need to find a man to provide financial security. But once you become that financial security yourself, who you're attracted to will change. When you become and awaken these aspects in yourself, and when you no longer "need" someone to complete these aspects of you to make you whole, that is when you step into a Dharma relationship. In a Dharma relationship, two wholes come together to usher in a new wave of consciousness effortlessly, naturally, to our planet. Today, I want to talk about three different aspects of relationships: Karmic, Limerence, and Dharmic. 

When you find yourself attracted to men or women who seem to trigger your deepest insecurities, you are likely entangled in a Karmic relationship. These aren't meant to be your happily ever after. Instead, they act as a mirror, reflecting the unhealed parts of your psyche. If you find yourself repeatedly falling for partners who abandon you, ignore your boundaries, or require constant fixing, it's a good time to take a look at what the universe is guiding you to heal. The lesson here is to stop looking outward for validation and to start cultivating that worth within yourself.

The Illusion of Limerence

From there, we often stumble into the trap of Limerence. This is that intoxicating, obsessive infatuation where we put someone on a pedestal. But here is the plot twist: you aren't actually in love with them; you are in love with a projection of yourself.

When I was deeply attracted to the funny, fiercely secure guy, it wasn't just about him. It was because my soul was craving that exact sense of humor and security within myself. If you find yourself chronically infatuated with artists, free spirits, or hyper-successful tycoons, ask yourself: What quality do they possess that I am denying myself permission to embody?

The Evolution of Choice: From Survival to Soul

This shift becomes incredibly obvious when we look at our material world. Historically, women were conditioned to seek partners primarily for financial survival and physical security. When your baseline motivation is "I need someone to take care of me," your radar will naturally tune into providers, even if they aren't an emotional match.

But look what happens when the script flips. Once you become your own financial security—when you pay your own bills, build your own empire, and hold down your own fort—the old checklist crumbles. You no longer need a transaction; you desire a connection. When survival is off the table, your attraction elevates from a place of lack to a place of alignment.

Stepping Into Your Dharmic Relationship

When you finally heal the karmic loops, reclaim the pieces of yourself you were projecting through limerence, and secure your own foundation, something miraculous happens. You stop looking for a missing puzzle piece because you realize you are already a complete puzzle.

This is the gateway to a Dharmic relationship.

A Dharmic relationship is not about two halves desperately clinging together to make a whole. It is the collision of two fully realized, whole individuals. There is no codependency, no subconscious testing, and no desperation. Instead, you come together effortlessly and naturally. A Dharmic union doesn't drain your energy; it multiplies it, creating a peaceful, stable baseline that actually raises the consciousness of the planet just by existing.

So, take a look at your current relationship patterns. Are you healing a debt, chasing a projection, or building an empire of conscious love?

Crab Story

~ 15 years ago: Our church went to a new camp, and there were a lot of tide pools and creatures within the tide pools. During this time of my life, I had become extremely introverted at my public middle school. It was 6th grade. I felt so disconnected. No one had comforted me during these crucial development years from a child to a woman. I was always a tom boy, a true father's-daughter. and it was encouraged by the patriarchal society around me. But what happens when you can't be a little boy anymore, when your body starts changing and you start getting hormonal changes? No longer can you pretend to be the tom boy, and almost instantly it's as if the father who loved you so much last year, doesn't recognize you and you feel so lost, betrayed, and honestly afraid. The woman's journey is vastly uncharted waters. We don't have elders, initiations, or even a society that explains or supports any of that journey. We're just basically told to keep ourselves contained. Literally and figuratively. Then we're sold and taxed on a box of tampons, with the motto on the side in big bold letters, "Stops 99% percent of leaks before they happen!" What's the one percent it doesn't stop? Our personalities, our bottled up rage, our suppressed talents or unpopular opinions?

Anyway, like I was saying, I was going through a lot emotionally. 

I spent my time at camp smashing crabs with rocks on the jetty. I fed them to sea anemones. It wasn't out of hate for crabs, I loved all sea life. I still do. In retrospect, it felt like my last shred of expressing the feminine before I got completely severed from it. The intuitive feminine knows the circle of life very well. This is the pre- domesticated feminine. The feminine that we were before patriarchy, suburbs, and modern life. As I like to call it, Womb and Tomb Energy. We understood the circle of life- we knew when things had to die, we didn't prolong unnecessary suffering. You see this in the animal kingdom a lot. When a pup isn't healthy, wolves and rabbits for example kill their young. I'm sure some of you are horrified right now reading this, but isn't it more horrifying that we have come to think prolonging suffering is the right thing to do? That seems very selfish. We used to let the dying die. 

Today, I was walking on the beach with my dogs. I saw a crab flipped over, belly up with his many legs and pinchers exposed. I went to touch him because I thought he was dead. He moved and I was startled, "What are you doing out here little buddy?!" There's no tide pools at Long Beach, he was a long ways from home. 

I tried to save him, I flipped him over. I walked down the beach and came back, but he still hadn't moved. So I picked him up and put him in the ocean, he was moving his mouth and occasionally his legs, but other than that, the tide was just washing over him and he wasn't doing well. I was like, "You got this buddy!" Knowing damn well he didn't have this. He was sick- there was algae all over the beach. But now, after 15 years of domestication, I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I walked away, feeling horrible, because we're all creatures from consciousness, and I just left him there to be sick on the beach instead of to return his little crab soul back to God (not the guy in the sky- the everything and the nothing, the unnamable, the simultaneously him, her, and it and also, nothing and everything at the same time).

Is this what years of being so out of touch with my Womb and Tomb Energy has done to me? I thought walking back home. 

I'm just becoming aware of this. I don't have anything to say about it yet. I just thought it was interesting and that I would share in hopes that other females can draw parallels in their lives. I'm writing a memoir about my heroine's journey, and this ties in perfectly with it. 

The Billie Eilish Effect

I reflected upon our society, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be authentic. The constant advertisements wear me down. Sewer rats driving Mercedes teach people how to grow their followers, as if that's what is most important in life. These pests will show you how to turn your hobby into money. Basically, they'll train you to unsee the quality in your creative life, and help you deface it by measuring its worth in dollars. And if you're not already pulled into shallow waters, they'll show you how to get paid for an old auto-accident.

And here I thought YouTube was invented so we could escape commercials, not drown in them.

Our society has been hypnotized into perpetuating the rat race- the false matrix. We have lost track of the point of life.  We're too mesmerized by giving our attention away or chasing external validation.

The most recurrent Youtube ad's are blatantly ageist. These marketers verbally attack a protected class and face no repercussions. 

"3 mistakes old people make...."

They say, as if youth were a skill.

In other words, our society has gone mad. We are the Leonardio DeCaprio in Shutter Island. We think we're killing it in life, yet don't realize we're the butt end of a very long joke. Yes, cool, our affiliate marketing payouts are mediocre at best. But what's truly tragic is how quickly we sold out and gave up our dignity for pocket change. We surrendered our authenticity, our full range of emotions- the very thing that makes us human.

For years, women were taught that there was no such thing as admiring another woman. There was only envy. We rationalized the irrational, the ugly, the cruel. As if it weren't already hard enough to be a woman in a society that patronizes and placates the feminine.

And just when it seemed like all hope was lost, a young woman released a dreamy song called Ocean Eyes on Soundcloud. Her Soundcloud picture was gorgeous, her voice was surreal and dystopian, and her melodies ethereal. Her name: Billie Eilish. 

It was as if rain finally fell on the desert of our entertainment industry.

Many people in their twenties feared they weren’t hot enough, skinny enough, or bitchy enough to protect the woman Hollywood monsters would destroy. They feared they wouldn't be taken seriously, or they'd be over-sexualized, objectified...you name it.

This is what I call The Billie Eilish Effect:

Our culture has been a dry lake for so long that we’re starving for realness. Billie Eilish came out with wild, unapologetic art and dressed like Flavor Flav. She didn’t care what her body looked like. She focused on what mattered most — her creative expression. Young and old women alike recognized the wild woman in her, and it was like the wild woman within them was looking into a mirror. It cracked the decades-old patriarchal nonsense we had tolerated for far too long.

"Is my art too much?" 

"Is this song too hood?"

"Do I look just enough sexy, but not quite trashy in this picture?"

Enough! Share your art, your creativity, now. Not at the right insta-post time. Now.

 No one thought, "Oof that Billie Eilish girl had a music video with demons...."

They were just like, "Hell yeah go Billie."

Our culture is so starved of authenticity, of uninhibited self-expression, that any authentic art you create will be devoured gratefully by the masses. 

People are so starved for something real that they will embrace your creative genius- no matter how strange.

You're laying the foundation for future women to express their creativity freely too. And don't you dare apologize for your work "not being serious/good/tasteful enough." 

Your art is exactly what society has been waiting for. Don't edit the realness out.

Paradoxical Breathing

 I remember when I first realized that my breathing wasn't like everyone else's. I was in elementary school. Mr. C taught our P.E. (Physical Education), and he educated us about our breath. 

"When we breathe in, our bellies expand, and when we breathe out, our bellies contract," he said with his hand on his belly to demonstrate. "Our ribs expand as we breathe in, and oxygen circulates through our body."

I sat on the gym floor next to all my classmates- criss cross applesauce, as we called it- with my hand on my belly. I took deep breaths, but for some reason, my belly was contracting as I was breathing in, and expanding as I was breathing out. I looked at everyone else having this moment together- the realization of their shared humanness. They connected their minds to their bodies, but I was confused. I felt like the only kid in the gym whose body wasn't breathing like everyone else's.

Mr. C had us do some exercises across the gym, which were always fun. Crab walking, cherry pickers, and running in circles. 

At the end of gym, I walked my 3-foot tall body up to Mr. C and said, "My belly is going in when I breathe in, and going out when I breathe out."

He said something like, "No, it's supposed to be the other way around."

He demonstrated again. I showed him my hand on my belly contracting inward when I breathed in and expanding out when I breathed out.

Gym was over though, and we had to line up to go back to class.

Mr. C probably thought I just wanted to be different. 

Throughout the following weeks, my mind was elsewhere in class. I kept trying to force my belly to go out with inhalation and to go in with exhalation. It was getting exhausting, because it felt like I had to relearn how to breathe, so I finally just forgot about it.

That was until a few weeks ago, when I started doing calisthenics along to Youtube videos. 

"Ok, now lift, inhale. Release, exhale," the workout instructor said in the video.

Again, I noticed my breathing being the opposite of hers. My breath is not always like this anymore, but I catch myself reverting to it almost as a default. 

Today, I decided to look up if this reverse breathing thing is considerable. If it really is something, I would like to learn about the phenomenon and fix it. 

I learned that it is in fact an irregularity. It's called paradoxical breathing. And it's not uncommon. 

It usually forms in response to chronic stress, trauma, anxiety, asthma, or muscular imbalances- especially from early developmental trauma or survival-based living. 

Paradoxical breathing can happen when:

1. Chronic Fight-or-Flight Activation

    -If your nervous system has been in high-alert mode (ex. from childhood trauma or chronic stress), your body developed dysfunctional breathing as a survival adaptation

2. Tension in the Diaphragm or Abdominals

    -The diaphragm may be tight or weak, and the accessory muscles (neck, chest, shoulders) are doing all the work, flipping your natural breath rhythm.

3. PTSD and Body Disconnection

    -Trauma can cause a disconnection from the body. You may have unintentionally avoided deep belly breathing to "not feel" emotions trapped in the gut area.

4. Postural Issues/ TMJ:

    -Neck tension or spine misalignment can also restrict proper diaphragmatic movement, forcing the body into compensatory patterns.

There are ways to fix paradoxical breathing. Some of these ways include somatic breathwork, myofascial release for diaphragm and core, nervous system regulation, and voice or singing work.

I have wanted to get vocal lessons to reclaim my voice for the past year. I realized that practicing my voice in a positive environment would unlock my fear of singing in front of people. In my experience, singing and vocal work have been a very underutilized tool that has the great possibility to activate and strengthen my throat chakra. 

In other words, empowerment.

Rebuilding the woman I am today is no small feat. But with that said, I am still choosing to love myself right now. I stopped fighting to perfect myself so I can be worthy of love. I spent too many years waiting until I was perfect to give myself the love I deserve. Ironically, the moment of achieving perfection never comes. The only moment is the now, and in this moment- again, the only moment- I choose to love myself and treat myself like I'm whole, because I am.

I intend to be fully engaged in the present moment and to do the next right thing. I will not get caught up in trying to get somewhere before I love myself or allow myself happiness.

Stay present, notice things about your body, and get curious enough to explore it.

I hope you, too, open the door to deeper understanding, healing, and connection with yourself. Breath is the beginning of everything.

Beyond Fault

10:30 A.M. Sunny Clear 

Shuk! A tennis ball flies through the air. 

My chug, Georgie, hurls himself after it. He dodges the waves, gallantly chasing the ball. 

Everyone cheers the little dog on. He maneuvers the whitewash with grace. How can you not be impressed?

Shuk! Shuk! Shuk! One ball after the next. George body surfs the waves in, ball in mouth, effortlessly. His sausage-like body gliding through the ocean is mesmerizing.

We- Georgie, Brian, and I- head back home, walking down Ocean Avenue, smiling at strangers. 

I see an older woman watering her petite garden in the square, cementless base of a city palm tree. 

I've seen her before.  

I don't know how to describe her. 

Frail- maybe. Delicate- not.

Three months ago, I overheard her scolding her husband, "Someone’s dog took a big shit right on our walkway!" I walked by, ironically with my two dogs, and said, "Hello!" 

In a singsong voice, she said, "Oh hi!" 

Fake. 

That kind of energy imprints itself.

People who aren't authentic stain my brain. It's indelible, irreversible. 

I couldn't forget it if I tried.

But I believe in love and kindness. Those virtues triumphed over my ego- not an easy feat- so they must have a greater power beyond me.

So she's watering her small garden, her crooked body holding a watering can, and I say, "I like your plants!"

She didn't hesitate to say something negative back. A lifetime of giving negativity the mic.

"Thanks! If only I could keep people from stealing them!"

I stop; this is too juicy. There are only 7 plants there. 

"Stealing them?" I ask earnestly. 

She’s got me, and she knows it.

"I come out and I just find holes. I tried planting the cheapest plants, but I came out to water them, and they're just gone."

A lifetime lived through the lens of being wronged. 

She strikes me as a justice person—the type that remembers every wrong done to her, and keeps score by planting marigolds.

"Maybe you just need so many plants that you won't notice if someone took one," I offer.

Practicality is my thing. I see the world through the lens of agency—whether I have the means to fix something, or have to invent a new way.

She smiles. Genuinely. I like that. 

I wave goodbye.

“You’ve got your troops out!” she lightly calls after me, with a little laugh.

All I hear is “troops." 

“Yeah!” I shout instinctively, raising a fist in the air before my brain catches up.

ICE agents had been on the beach earlier, and it rattled me. I stand up for our brothers and sisters.

I keep walking, thinking about behavior, pride, and how in awkward, uncertain moments, we all want something to stand behind. Something to feel proud of. Even if it’s just our little dog troops.

And suddenly, I feel something strange—sympathy for post-war Germans. That shameful, frayed nationalism that seeps in when people are desperate, the economy’s broken, and nothing feels certain. That blind need to feel strong.

It takes real strength to resist that. To choose kindness. Love.

Anyone can fall into rage, into blame. Anyone can commit atrocities when no one’s watching. But it takes a brave human to rise above that—to look your fear in the face and say, No. Not today. I choose love.

Sobriety as a Spiritual Rebellion: Opting Out of Psychic Warfare

    In a world saturated with distraction, clarity is radical.

    To be fully present—to feel everything and still choose love—is the new rebellion. Our generation leads the way for uprooting inherited toxic behaviors- whether that's a head in the sand approach to life, using distractions to numb out our intuition, or perpetuating the rat race. If your parents were self-employed or independent contractors, they planted the seed of autonomy. Whether they knew it or not, they challenged the systems that bind people to dependency and conformity. That same spirit is rising in our generation—demanding we live with intention, not sedation. 

    
    We have all been through some shit. To have gone through that pain, and simply just dismiss it or pretend it isn't a part of you, is to deny your wholeness. Psychic warfare isn’t about bombs or bullets—it’s about the invisible battles we fight every day. It’s the constant stream of noise trying to hijack our attention, our peace, and our inner knowing. It's the culture of comparison on social media, the glorification of hustle to the point of burnout, the YouTube advertisements that pollute your vibe, and the normalization of coping mechanisms that keep us numb instead of awake.

Psychic warfare is the way we’re conditioned to doubt our intuition. To silence that quiet voice that says, This isn’t right for me. It’s the way substances, distractions, and even our own thoughts are weaponized against our growth.  This engineered chaos that keeps you distracted normalizes coping instead of healing, numbing instead of feeling, and scrolling instead of showing up.

When you get sober, you will feel. Everything.

Grief. Rage. Regret. 

Old stories resurface like ghosts looking for peace. But this is the sacred part. This is where you meet yourself. And from that place—undistracted, undrugged, undenied—you will rebuild your life from truth. You’re not losing the high. You’re becoming the signal. 

Sobriety isn't a punishment, it's a life upgrade. 

So yes, it’s hard at first. You’ll feel exposed and uncertain. But what’s coming through isn’t weakness—it’s your real self, finally unfiltered. And in that clarity, you begin to choose, not cope. You create, not consume. You connect, not perform.

Sobriety isn’t just about quitting. It’s about becoming sovereign over your energy. It’s not about losing access to highs—it’s about learning to generate a natural high from truth, beauty, alignment, and peace. We’re not meant to numb our way through this life. We’re meant to feel it, shape it, and lead others home by example.

If this resonates, share it. If it awakens something in you, write about it. Speak about it. Start where you are.

And if you feel lonely on this path—know this:
No company is better than company that keeps you small, stuck, or cycling through a life you don’t even want.

Reframe your alone time not as "loneliness," but as the space where you meet your power, your clarity, your next frequency.

Don’t fill the space just to escape the silence.
Let the silence shape you.
Let it sharpen your standards. Let it prepare you for people who reflect your expansion—not your past.

You are not alone.
You are becoming someone worth meeting.

Relief for Seeker Personalities

To the Seeker personalities: 

If you feel like you’re not doing enough, or that you need to do something unrelated to complete your goals, I want you to realize that the highest version of your life has already been created, and you are on the path to it now. Keep going, don’t start something new and unrelated to your current goals. Finish what you started, take your current project as far as it can go. 

Farmers don’t plant crops, then pull them out of the ground before the harvest to plant new, bigger and better crops. Everything moves in a cyclical rhythm. It is the law of nature to do so. When times are slow, accept the slowness as a time to renew yourself. Take time to prepare yourself for next phase of expansion. Reflect on what’s working for you and what needs to change next time around. If you’re not completing your goals, chances are you’re not giving them enough time to fully grow.

So relax, stop seeking, and start finding that everything you need is already within you. You are on the right path, exactly where you need to be at this moment. God has impeccable timing.