Hi everyone. I have some news to share, but first, a little background.

Over the past few months, I’ve been creating something called The Map of Human Experience. It’s part of Becoming We, the framework at the center of my work, and it’s built on a simple idea: how we experience life depends on how we meet the unknown. You can see the full map and watch short videos explaining it here.

Creating The Map has been a bizarre and profound journey. It felt less like something I made and more like something that wanted to come through me. It was as if life had something to say, and my experience was how it chose to say it. Today, you’ll understand why.

Here’s the news. I have breast cancer.

Before you start to panic, hear this. It’s non-invasive and stage zero. That means we caught it early, and the cancer is completely contained inside my breast. It is not life-threatening, and it is 100% treatable. It does, however, require surgery.

Many of you know I have a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). My body doesn’t produce collagen properly, which affects my health in big ways. Because of this, I’ve decided to have a double mastectomy without reconstruction. The kids these days call that going flat.

While that is the most cosmetically dramatic option, it is ultimately a blessing. It lets me avoid radiation, chemo, ongoing medication, and additional surgeries, all of which would be hard with EDS. So next week, we say goodbye to the ta-tas.

Ironically, this news comes during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So for the ladies in the house, let me be your reminder to schedule your annual mammogram. That’s how mine was found. The cancer is the size of a few grains of salt, far too small to feel. The machine did its job, and that is exactly why my survival rate is 99%, and my chance of recurrence is less than 1%. It’s all worth the slight discomfort of being squished.

As many of you know, I’m no stranger to hard things. When my husband died unexpectedly four years ago, I started writing weekly essays as a way to process the pain out loud. I didn’t have the words then to explain how I was navigating it all. Now I do.

The Map

Facing the unexpected is part of being human. We don’t know what will happen from one moment to the next. It’s like standing at the threshold of a doorway, unsure what’s waiting on the other side. I call this the Doorway of the Unknown.

Every time we stand at that threshold, we answer nine key questions, usually without even noticing:

Am I right? Am I welcome? Am I valuable? Am I seen? Am I understood? Am I safe? Am I enough? Am I powerful? Am I whole?

Over the years, I’ve learned we don’t cross that doorway alone. We have a Navigator, two, in fact, and each one answers those questions differently.

Our Mind uses past experience to predict what’s coming. It packs a metaphorical backpack with survival ingredients, like doubt, scarcity, or the fear of being invisible, so we’re braced for the worst. It’s trying to protect us, and sometimes it does.

Our Knowing doesn’t need to predict. It already knows who we are. It packs thriving ingredients instead, like faith, possibility, and love. Which Navigator fills the backpack shapes everything we experience on the other side of the door.

It looks like this:

I started working on The Map about two months before my diagnosis. Every day, I checked in with myself and noticed which ingredients I was carrying. When was I doubting, and when did I have faith? When was I feeling invisible, and when did I feel authentic and seen? It took a lot of practice being honest with myself.

So when the diagnosis came, it was almost comical. The usual thought of “how in the hell am I going to navigate this?” was replaced by “holy shit, I have a map to navigate this!”

Right after I learned I needed a biopsy, I pulled up The Map on my phone and sat in the parking lot of my doctor’s office, looking at it. I asked myself, calmly, “Okay. What ingredients do I want to bring into this experience?” Love and possibility leaped off the page.

It was like taking a dose of my own medicine.

What I started noticing

When I let Knowing answer at the Doorway of the Unknown, everything shifted. Instead of feeling like life was out to get me, I started noticing all the ways it seemed to be working with me. Some of those moments were almost too on the nose.

I play the New York Times Spelling Bee every morning. On the day of my surgical consultation, I couldn’t find the pangram, the word that uses all the letters. I usually get it, but that day I just couldn’t. The next morning, I revealed the answer. It was implants. I literally couldn’t get the implants.

When I got ridiculously lost in the hospital on the way to my oncologist, the hospital chaplain found me and walked me there himself. He took me through a staff-only corridor. The sign on the door said “Testing Area.”

And when I was deciding whether going flat was right for me, a friend who knew nothing about my diagnosis sent me an article about pottery called How to Say Yes to Life. It featured an artist who said that whenever she tried to force the clay into standard bowl shapes, it collapsed. But when she let the material become what it needed to be, it was beautiful. Here’s what her pottery looks like:

Maybe these are signs. Maybe they’re just what a person notices when she’s paying attention. Either way, I was paying attention, and that’s the point. The Mind scans for threats. Knowing notices gifts.

What I mean by more than surviving

I want to be careful here, because I know many of you have faced diagnoses far harder than mine, or have lost people you love to this disease. Mine was caught early, and that’s a gift not everyone gets. Choosing to thrive is not a promise about outcomes, and it is not a judgment of anyone who has had to fight. Our Mind’s survival instincts exist for a reason. They’ve gotten many of us through our worst days, including me.

But I’ve come to believe that our entire human experience depends on what’s inside our backpacks. We can’t keep the hard things from happening. We can decide how we want to experience them, by choosing who answers the key questions at the Doorway of the Unknown.

So when I tell you I’m thriving, please believe me. Yes, a breast cancer diagnosis is a big deal. Yes, it’s one more thing on the list of hard things from the last four years. Yes, the surgery will be painful, and it will take time to adjust to my new body. But no, I am not here to just survive this.

For me, life is not a battle to be fought. It is a gift to be lived.

The circumstances of our lives do not define us. Diagnoses do not define us. Our belief in our own humanity does.

I know my map. I choose to thrive.

How You Can Help

Recovery from this surgery takes about six weeks. I’ll write when I can, but expect things to pause for a little while. In the meantime, here are a few ways you can help.

Join my Love Team. A friend coined the term, and we’re using it for people who believe in prayer or meditation. If you’d like to join, just comment “LT” below. On the morning of my surgery, you’ll get a reminder to send your prayers, thoughts, and love into the cosmos.

Leave a comment

Become a paid subscriber. I don’t need soup, a meal train, or rides anywhere. Thank you for asking! I have amazing friends and family taking care of all of that. What I could use is financial support. As a solo business owner, my job doesn’t come with sick leave. If you read these essays and appreciate my work, now is a meaningful time to show it. You can become a paid subscriber for $8 a month or $80 a year.

Subscribe now

Use and share The Map of Human Experience. If you haven’t explored it yet, you can find it at the link below. When I return, I’ll be launching an app called What You Carry, an immersive experience that shows you what’s inside your own backpack. Until then, I encourage you to explore the Map and see how you can put it to use now.

The Map of Human Experience

Filled with love and possibility,

Susan is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week, without fail, from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Hi everyone, welcome back. Our theme for this month is The Map of Human Experience. It’s a new piece of Becoming We that I’ve been working on extensively for the past few months. It’s exactly what the title describes: a map of how humans experience the world. Big claim, I know. Stick with me. Last week in the introduction, I revealed the underlying premise:

The human experience is directly impacted by our relationship with the unknown.

There’s a video that explains the idea. If you haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to pause for a minute, return to last week’s essay, and do so. This week, I’m going to reveal the actual map. But before I do, there’s a story, of course.

For the past few weeks, we’ve had house guests. My cousin from out of state has started college at the university in our town. Before his freshman move-in date, he and his mom stayed with us to get settled and buy everything he needed for his dorm room. It’s been so much fun having them here and being part of such an important life transition. If you’ve ever gone off to college, or dropped a kid off at one, you know how emotional it can be. There’s so much unknown to navigate. It’s exciting, terrifying, and awkward all at the same time, for everyone.

Before move-in day, I told my cousin about my own college drop-off. For the most part, it was pretty typical. My parents drove me to school in our pickup truck, filled with all my stuff. There was the awkward meeting of my randomly assigned roommate and her family, and the realization that these were really small quarters to suddenly be sharing with a stranger. We bonded over it immediately. Our moms helped us unpack and hang our clothes in the tiny closets, while our dads figured out how to loft the beds and fit the mini fridge and beanbag chairs underneath.

Once the truck was unloaded and everything was set up, I hugged my parents in the hallway, we said our goodbyes, and I shut the door behind me. It was a symbolic gesture of moving from one stage of life to the next. Until, about ten minutes later, when I heard a knock-knock-knock.

I opened the door to find my dad standing there holding three things: a roll of duct tape, some rope, and $20. “I thought you might need these,” he said bluntly. He handed me the supplies, kissed me on the forehead, and walked away. That was it. The last few things my dad thought I needed to survive college.

The rope in particular became a running joke among my friends. We came up with all sorts of creative uses for it. The best was when we learned to lasso things off the floor from our lofted beds, a genius way to avoid climbing up and down the ladder every time a pillow fell.

I didn’t give my cousin an actual rope on his move-in day, but it has become a sort of metaphorical item for him, too. We all keep finding funny uses for it and declaring, “Use the rope!”

There are certain times in life, like going off to college, when our navigation into the unknown is very obvious. But there are ordinary micro-moments as well. Every day, we face the unexpected, and the supplies we have, what we’re carrying, and the paths we take greatly affect how we experience it.

Today, I’m presenting the actual Map of Human Experience. The video below introduces what it is and how it works. Below that is the map itself. The video is only three and a half minutes long, and I really hope you’ll watch it. It’s been a labor of love, and this feels like my own milestone moment. Thanks for riding along on the journey of Becoming We.

Explore the Map of Human Experience

Susan is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Hi everyone, welcome back. It's a new month, which means a new theme, and this one is a little different. Last time, I mentioned I'd been working on something, and today I'm excited to finally introduce you to it.

To begin, there’s something you should know about me. This is probably not a secret, but I’m kind of an odd duck. Full of curiosity, with a different way of seeing and experiencing the world. From a very young age, I was the strange kid asking the big philosophical questions, finding meaning in funny places, and always trying to connect the dots to see the bigger picture. I can’t really help it; that’s just how my brain works. Some people have described this as a gift, and over time, I’ve come to believe that too.

The first half of my life was fairly predictable. Then, five months before my 40th birthday, everything changed in an instant. When my husband Satish died, I went from a safe, secure, and stable life to being thrown headfirst into the unknown. If you’ve been reading these essays from the beginning, you watched me navigate it. Writing has always been how my curious, meaning-making brain documents what’s happening inside me, a way to observe the world and my place in it. Along the way, I’ve had a lot of realizations.

Recently, those realizations began to coalesce into a single idea: the human experience is directly impacted by our relationship with the unknown. I think I’d been living inside that idea since the day Satish died. I just didn’t have the words for it yet. So I did what my brain does: I started observing, reading, listening, learning, and writing. What emerged is a new piece of Becoming We that I’m calling The Map of Human Experience, and it’s our theme for this month.

Now, here's where my odd-duck brain comes in. This work has felt less like something I’m creating and more like something I’m translating. As many of you know, I don't see pictures in my mind, so ideas don't arrive for me as images. I also don't really have an inner critic, that voice so many people describe that narrates and judges everything they do. Instead, ideas arrive as a feeling, and I spend a lot of quiet, meditative time sitting with that feeling until it finds form. Sometimes it takes many tries before it feels right.

When the ideas finally take shape, it doesn’t always feel like they came from me. Almost as if life itself has something to tell us, and my experiences are how it's finding its way through. As woo-woo as that may sound, it's the most honest way I can describe how the Map of Human Experience is being made.

Over the next month, I’ll introduce it to you piece by piece. Today’s video is the introduction: why so much of our human experience depends on our relationship with the unknown.

The video is just two and a half minutes long, and you’ll find it below. If it sparks ideas or questions, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Susan is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Hi everyone, welcome back. If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed I didn't post an essay last week. That’s because I’m working on an exciting project that’s taking a lot of brainpower. I’m very eager to share it with you, hopefully soon. But for now, it’s not quite ready yet. So if this newsletter doesn’t land in your inbox consistently, know it’s because I’m working on something really special that’s just around the corner.

Today, we continue exploring the theme for September, We, and I want to talk about something that I think is a crucial piece of Becoming We — empathy.

The ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person is critical to any relationship. As a mom of a middle schooler, I am very aware of this. Half the time I have no idea what the hell my kid is thinking or feeling, and I know for sure he has no idea what I’m thinking or feeling 90% of the time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be standing in the living room, once again, with a vein pulsing out of my forehead, reminding him in my calm voice that the couch is not the laundry hamper for his pungent-smelling soccer socks.

Empathy is becoming more and more difficult for me to practice in our house. It’s different from sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone else’s situation. Or compassion, which is feeling a need to alleviate someone else’s suffering. Empathy is when you are able to actually share the other person’s experience, and there are three ways to do this.

Cognitive empathy is when we intellectually understand someone else’s mental state — you can see the world through their eyes without necessarily sharing their pain. Affective empathy is when you actually feel or mirror the other person’s emotional pain. And somatic empathy is when you have a physical reaction in your body to what someone else is going through.

I never really understood the nuance in all of this until I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower — the 1993 novel I’ve written about before (essay 136: The Future). The main character is a teenage girl with “hyperempathy syndrome,” a condition that forces her to physically feel the pain of anyone she witnesses being hurt. In the post-apocalyptic setting, it’s a huge liability. The worst-case scenario, and most psychologically mind-bending, is when she is forced to fight people for her own survival. Any pain she causes to others, she immediately feels inside her own body. In this way, her condition literally blurs the line between you and me.

I’ve thought about her a lot lately. What if that condition was real? And what if it wasn’t just any condition, but a contagious one? Right now it’s difficult for us to understand the suffering of people who don’t look like us, live near us, or share our background. But if hyperempathy spread like COVID, it wouldn’t care about the boxes we’ve put ourselves in. Would we still draw the same boundaries between “us” and “them” if we had no biological choice but to feel each other’s pain?

It’s a fun thought experiment. But I don’t get to wait around for empathy to become a contagion. I have a kid who needs to learn it now. You see, it’s not a feeling that arrives; it’s a skill to be built. And the only way to teach it is to model it. If I can get an ounce of it to stick into that pubescent brain, maybe the world will be a wee bit better.

This summer, I got a glimpse of that alternative future — though not in the way I expected. One day, when I picked my son and his friend up from rowing camp, they got in the car and immediately began to tell me a story about something dramatic that happened. They were standing around waiting for another boat to come back, innocently tossing rocks into the water, as boys do. An older man walked up and became very frustrated by this. He went to the marina staff and complained that a bunch of boys were aggressively throwing rocks, trying to destroy private property. The marina staff talked with the rowing instructor, who confirmed that the man was mistaken and nothing malicious was occurring.

At this point, I expected the story to take a turn into complaining about the crotchety old man who was trying to get them in trouble. But when I asked, “Why do you think the guy complained?” their answer shocked me. They said, “Well, he was really, really old, and looked pretty lonely.” And then, they made a vow. If they saw him again, they’d stop and say hello.

It wasn't hyperempathy. It was detachment combined with empathy. Biology didn't force them to automatically feel his loneliness. Instead, they were able to detach their own worthiness from his judgment, and then chose to imagine what he might be experiencing. That kind of cognitive discipline and empathy is a beautiful skill. Maybe more powerful and better than any fictional condition.

So to all the middle school moms out there, tired of picking up stinky socks, I see you. Keep up the good fight. You’re contributing to Becoming We. A future with these kids leading it is very promising.

Susan is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone! I want to start with a little celebration. Have you ever wondered why the titles of my essays start with a number? Well, that indicates the total number of pieces I’ve written. I began the blog on May 22, 2022, with 01: The Beginning. Which means that today marks essay number 200! 🎉 Four years of weekly posts. It’s a bit mind-boggling that I’ve written so much, and even more astonishing that you keep reading. Thank you. Especially to those who have been here from the start. I appreciate you more than you know.

Today, we continue exploring the theme for September: We. I want to talk about something that keeps popping up, and it’s driving me bat shit crazy - The Golden Rule.

We all know this, right? The very famous phrase, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That exact phrasing, of course, comes from the Bible, and it’s become sort of a cultural moral code on how we’re supposed to treat each other. It’s often paired with the other famous biblical passage “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I don’t know why, but I keep hearing both of these phrases everywhere. On podcasts, in news headlines, and in parenting circles from moms who desperately want their kids to not grow up and become jerks. Apparently, September is even Golden Rule Awareness Month in Wisconsin. Part of that Midwestern hospitality, I guess.

While I can appreciate the intention behind the Golden Rule, I dislike the rule itself. Before you yell blasphemy, let me explain.

The first time I heard a critique of the Golden Rule was in graduate school. I was taking an ethics class, and we were discussing the moral responsibilities of public institutions. We went down a sort of philosophical rabbit hole examining the rule, revealing its flaws, and eventually introducing a different idea called the Platinum Rule. This new rule was officially introduced in the academic world in 1979 by sociologist Dr. Milton Bennett and popularized in the mid-1990s by Dr. Tony Alessandra and Dr. Michael J. O’Connor in a business book called The Platinum Rule: Discover the Four Basic Business Personalities. I was blown away by the difference in the rules. So much so that I remember sitting in class, getting very angry that I had lived nearly 30 years on this planet and nobody told me about the very important adjustment to the rule. Like I had been betrayed by the laws of society.

Here’s the basic argument. While the Golden Rule advises that you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the Platinum Rule states do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. That’s it. Plain and simple. Don’t project your own desires onto someone else. Instead, imagine, or even better, ask them, what they would like for themselves.

When you see these two rules beside each other, the flaws in the Golden Rule become strikingly obvious. Treat others as you want to be treated is incredibly self-centered. It assumes everyone shares your same preferences, experiences the world the same way you do, and that what’s best for you would be best for them. Equity 101 stuff. The Platinum Rule, on the other hand, invites us to treat others as they want to be treated, which avoids assumptions and shows empathy. It requires that you put yourself in the other person’s shoes to understand their unique perspective.

Can you imagine how things might be different if we culturally shifted from gold to platinum? Inclusivity would be vastly more possible. Maybe our leaders would be more compassionate and empathetic, not trying to write their limited worldviews and perspectives into universal law. We might get things like patient-centered healthcare, customized workplace incentives and structures, and schools that rely less on standardized tests. Just imagine.

But of course, this is not the world we live in today. You see, switching to the Platinum Rule isn’t as simple as it may seem. It requires much more psychological effort. Instead of guessing how to treat people based on your own life experience, you must listen, ask questions, tolerate differences, and accept that other people’s desires might be completely different than your own.

Which means we also need to understand our own desires. It requires the ability to self-reflect, identify what we want, and openly communicate it to others. Without that upfront communication, we mostly end up guessing what other people want anyway, projecting our own biases on them. The Platinum Rule is tricky business, too.

Another reason the Golden Rule has held up for thousands of years and the Platinum Rule hasn’t replaced it is that universality is useful. A rule that says “treat everyone according to their own preferences” doesn’t tell a legislator how to write a law that applies to millions of strangers whose preferences they’ll never know. It also assumes good faith on both ends - a con artist is, in a sense, a master of the Platinum Rule, expertly giving people exactly what they want in order to exploit them. So platinum has its own blind spots. Which might be why the Golden Rule never traveled alone.

Let’s look at the companion phrase, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Today, there’s lots of focus on the neighbor part of the sentence. Who exactly do we mean by neighbor? The guy living next door? The one with the big truck, and the MAGA sign, and political beliefs that are way different from my own. Am I supposed to love THAT guy? Yes. That’s what many modern-day interpretations point to.

But there’s an older interpretation that’s a little different. The 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart highlights a different word in the sentence — as. The sentence does not read “Love your neighbor as much as yourself.” It reads “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Suggesting that the division that exists between individuals is an illusion. That he is me and I am him. We are all one.

This interpretation completely flips the script on both the Golden Rule and the Platinum Rule. If you and I are one, then who is doing unto whom, exactly? Is there a difference? Is how I treat my neighbor actually a reflection of how I treat myself? It’s like a mind-bending riddle that kind of breaks your brain.

If separateness is the illusion, then “do unto others” stops being instructions about two people and becomes something closer to looking at yourself in a mirror. That’s disorienting. Part of me wants to resolve it neatly and move on. But I think the discomfort is the point. Maybe the riddle isn’t meant to be solved so much as experienced.

Here’s what I think this all means, in practical terms, without solving the philosophical or theological conundrum. Simply put, we need each other.

The Golden Rule alone isn’t enough, and neither is the Platinum Rule on its own. To truly treat each other well, we need to understand ourselves and each other, simultaneously. Before I can understand you, I need to understand me, and before you can understand me, you need to understand you. It’s all intertwined.

So the next time you hear someone reference the Golden Rule, maybe pause for a moment. The answer to whatever problem you’re trying to solve with the rule is probably a bit more complicated. If the ultimate goal is to spread love, then we have to go one step further. We have to become We.

Susan is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Want help figuring out your own version of the Platinum Rule?

Knowing how you want to be treated is hard enough. Knowing how someone else wants to be treated - and building the self-awareness to ask for what you need in return - is even harder. That’s most of what I do in 1:1 coaching: helping people get clear enough on their own desires, so they can actually show up for someone else’s. If that’s a conversation you want to have, book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether coaching is the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Hi, everyone. It’s September! How did that happen so quickly?

Given that the year is two-thirds over, I thought this would be a good time to recap the territory we’ve covered so far in 2026. For those just tuning in, I write essays each week exploring what it means to be human. The theme for this year is Becoming We, where I’ve challenged us to think of our individual selves not as an “I” but as a “We.” Because that’s what humans are — not one singular thing, but a collection of multiple parts.

At the beginning of the year, we looked at each of the pieces that make us human — body, mind, and soul. Then we explored what it takes to integrate them, which I call the art of Becoming. It turns out this kind of integration is tricky, so we spent the next three months Pausing, Practicing, and building Intention. That’s a lot of time focused on the “I” part of the equation.

All that self-reflection is essential, but individual self-help isn’t the final destination. The real power of becoming whole internally is that it ripples outward into the world. Today I want to talk about the collective We. It starts with a story about a kite.

A few weeks ago, Kushal and I went camping at the beach with my friend Emily and her teenage son. One morning, the four of us rode our bikes down to fly kites. It was the perfect day for it — sunshine and a steady breeze without too much wind.

We’d packed two kites. One was the typical kind, snap-together sticks in a triangle with a green tail — perfect for kids. The other was one of those advanced trick kites, the kind with two handles that let you carve loops and figure eights. It was clearly built for adults, and it showed: whoever used it last had shoved it into its bag like a sleeping bag, and when we pulled it out, it was the biggest knotted mess of string and vinyl I’d ever seen.

“Well, that’s a lost cause,” I said. I meant it — if I’d been alone, that kite would have gone straight in the trash, string and all. But Emily didn’t even look up. She was more optimistic, and slowly, quietly, she started working the knots loose. I helped the boys put the kid kite together, and when I turned back, expecting Emily to have given up on the trick kite, she was still at it.

“How’s it going?” I asked, with reservation.

“I think it’s possible,” she said, “it’s just hard to untangle in the wind,” as the kite twirled and flapped between her hands. I walked over, and the fabric suddenly plastered itself to my body like a sheet of paper against a wall.

“Ooh — stay like that!” Emily said. So I did. I stood there being a human shelf while her hands worked the string loose, faster now that she had something to brace against.

We got mesmerized by that kite — fixated on the strings, over, under, around, through the loop. Time evaporated. We were so absorbed that we looked up and realized that the tide had come in and our bikes were about to float out to sea. We hauled them to higher ground and went right back to the impossible pursuit.

I have no idea how long it took. But eventually we did it. What had been a giant ball of tangled string became a fully rigged kite, ready to fly. The next problem: neither of us knew how to fly it. With Emily at the reins, I lifted it into the air, then sprinted away as it swooped left and right like a falcon coming in for an attack. I stopped, dropped, and rolled, as if I’d just jumped off a moving train.

I lay in the sand laughing harder than I had in a long time — the kind of laughing that leaves your abs sore and makes you a little afraid you’ve peed your pants. Eventually I got up, and we tried again. After a few rounds, Emily got the hang of the reins. The kite held steady, and we whooped as if we’d just won the Super Bowl.

That’s what it means to be a “We.” I would never have attempted that untangling alone. I don’t have the patience. If left to me, it would have been a lot of curse words and a bag of string in the trash.

But Emily couldn’t have done it alone either. The conditions weren’t cooperative — she needed me as the human shelf to free up her hands and take some of the load off. The only way that kite got built was together. Alone: torture. Together: flow state and belly laughs.

Right now, I look at the world and see division, uncertainty, scarcity, and dread everywhere I turn. I’d guess you see it too. When I see it, it reminds me how much we need each other — we can’t solve collective problems with individual minds.

But we also have to be intentional about what we each bring to the collective. My skepticism and doubt would not have gotten that kite off the ground. Emily’s faith was the ingredient that led us to even try.

Here’s the thing: we are not simply individuals each participating in the human experience — we are the raw ingredients that together create the human experience itself. Which brings us to September’s theme: We.

Becoming We is more than a self-help pursuit. It has a deeper purpose. It’s about pursuing who we want to become, collectively, by becoming who we are individually. That’s how we stop building the world none of us wants, and start building the one we do.

I’m the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. I write every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Writing is only part of what I do. If something in this essay is hitting closer to home than a story about video games usually should — a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working — I also coach 1:1, and that’s a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to exploring what it means to Become We. This is the last week for our monthly theme of Intention: moving from reactive living to intentional choosing. In reflecting on this theme, I was reminded of a moment when I witnessed the distinction between the two play out in real time. It involved a video game.

I myself have never been much of a video game player. Satish was. We joked that it was a place for his alter ego to come out. In real life, he was full of integrity, thinking through the morality of every decision and meticulously judging other people for theirs. It was nearly impossible for him to create harm intentionally. But when he played video games, all that went out the window. It was as if the itty bitty flame of rebellious evil inside of him used video games as an escape door. The manipulative, dark, and murderous version of Satish became embodied in his video game characters.

There was one game where he was particularly ruthless. It’s called Red Dead Redemption and is an open-world action-adventure game set in the early 1900s Wild West. The main character is a former outlaw whose wife and son are taken hostage by federal agents. To win back his family and clear his past, he is forced to hunt down his former gang members and make choices about what to do with them. Satish’s choices were always ruthless.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out when Kushal was 4 years old. Satish knew the game was way too violent for a preschooler, so he was very careful to not play it when Kushal was around. But one day, Kushal and I came home to find Satish on the couch with the controller in his hands. Kushal was immediately interested, so Satish told him it was a game about horses. From then on, Kushal would ask if they could play the “horsey game” together. Satish would oblige, and they would roam around the wild-west landscape, riding horses, hunting for squirrels, and roasting them on the bonfire. Nothing violent at all.

That worked for a while, until one particular day when the aforementioned gang members came to find Satish’s character, because he had done something dreadful earlier in the storyline and they were seeking revenge. Knowing that a massive bloody shootout was about to go down, he looked over at Kushal and yelled, “Close your eyes,” then shoved his young son’s face into the couch and covered his head with a pillow. Kushal was stunned and confused about what was going on, and began screaming. Satish just kept playing with one hand, and the other hand restraining Kushal with the pillow, yelling, “Don’t look! Don’t look!” As soon as the mass murder was over, he rode the horse to a different location, one where mutilated bodies were not tossed all around like confetti. Then he uncovered Kushal’s eyes and made up a story about being attacked by a scary bear. Kushal seemed to buy it, but soon got bored anyway and ran off into another room to play with his Lego.

When Kushal was gone, Satish turned to me with a look of horror on his face and said, “That was a close one! I didn’t know what else to do!” I looked at him, tilted my head in curiosity, and asked, “Did at no point it occur to you to just stop playing the game?” He stared back at me with a blank face for a few seconds and then said flatly, “No. No, it did not.” Then we both burst into laughter.

This moment was a perfect demonstration of the distinction between reactive living and intentional choosing. Satish had forgotten that what he was actually doing was playing a game. He was so immersed in the story that the game impacted his choices in actual life.

Had I not been there to witness the whole thing, I’m not sure that Satish would have ever realized how preposterous the whole thing was. I think he would have actually thought he made a good choice and saved the day. Which is exactly why we need each other.

We need people whom we trust, who can look at us with loving kindness and remind us that it’s all just a game. It’s not real. It’s just a story. You don’t have to make a reactive choice, because that role you’re playing is not the true you. Sometimes the hardest question we can ask each other is the one Satish couldn't answer: can you just stop playing the game?

I’m the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. I write every week without fail from Olympia, Washington. This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Writing is only part of what I do. If something in this essay is hitting closer to home than a story about video games usually should — a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working — I also coach 1:1, and that’s a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another week of essays exploring what it means to Become We. Our theme for this month is Intention: moving from reactive living to intentional choosing. While it may seem like a big and lofty goal, today I want to share a story about one of the smallest intentional decisions I recently made that had a very big impact. I took a nap.

A few weeks ago, my friend Emily was in town visiting from Georgia. Our families took a couple of days’ vacation and went camping at the beach. It was a lovely break. My intention for the trip was just to be. To spend time with the people I love, soaking up every moment to its fullest.

On one particular day, we packed a lot in. We visited a fishing village, ate fresh seafood, watched the surfers, rented go-carts, and enjoyed the sunshine. When we returned to our campsite in the afternoon, I was exhausted. So I decided to walk to the beach and take a nap. It wasn’t a quick jaunt. To get to the beach, you had to walk along this trail through the dunes for about 20 minutes. About halfway down the path, my Fitbit congratulated me for tracking 15,000 steps, and I began to realize what a stupid decision this was. Why was I walking another 20 minutes to get some rest, when I could have just laid down in my sleeping bag at the campsite? Nevertheless, I journeyed on.

When I got to the beach, I found a warm patch of sand and placed my blanket facing the ocean. I lay down on my back, and as the sun shone down on my face, I realized I made another stupid mistake. I didn’t bring any sunscreen. My face was already crispy from the day’s activities, and more sunshine was a recipe for a red forehead, burnt nose, and a headache. Deciding that I had not walked 20 minutes for nothing, I took my sweatshirt and made a face cover pillow contraption that was good enough to keep the sun away while also being moderately comfortable.

As I lay on the blanket, I could feel the wind picking up and realized I had made another stupid mistake. The top of the dune was blowing like a wave, dumping sand on my blanket. I peeked out of my sweatshirt face pillow contraption to find my legs were covered in sand, reminiscent of when young children bury each other alive.

Still determined, I decided to move to a different spot. I unwrapped my sweatshirt, picked up my blanket, walked down the beach, and found a different dune that was more sheltered from the wind. Just as I was about to sit down, I looked over to find two teenagers taking advantage of the dunes’ privacy. I quickly and silently jolted away.

This nap was not going as planned.

Finally, I found a good spot. I lay down, got settled, and closed my eyes.

This time, the sand cradled my tired and sun-touched skin perfectly. The temperature was just right. The roar of the ocean was incredibly soothing. I had nowhere else to go, or nothing else to do, but to lie there, being held by the earth. I could just be.

It was then that I realized how rare a moment this was. In our modern lives, there is always a role to play. I am a Mom, dishwasher, chauffeur, bill payer, dog walker, gas pump attendant, floor sweeper, gardener, chef, homework helper, and on, and on, and on. The roles and responsibilities never end. We always have to be something.

And if we’re not being something, we’re feeling something. I am sad, tired, happy, anxious, weak, strong, worthy, loved, worthless, imperfect, wise, stupid, and on, and on, and on, and on. Over time, it can become difficult to decouple the “I am” from the ____ (fill in the blank) that typically follows. It can make you wonder, who am I, actually?

Lying in the sand at the beach, it was a rare moment to not be anything at all. I got to just be.

After about 20 minutes, I woke up to my skin sweating inside my sweatshirt face pillow contraption, and decided to get up. It was time to walk back to camp, where all the roles, and labels, and feelings would become re-attached to my being.

I’ve been sitting with that word, “re-attached,” ever since. Because that’s really what happened. The nap didn’t erase Mom, or chauffeur, or tired, or worthy. It just gave me twenty minutes where none of them had found me yet. I walked back up that trail and picked every one of them back up, same as I always do.

That awareness, I think, is the difference between reactive living and intentional choosing. The practice is pausing long enough to create space for that awareness to emerge.

I didn’t get that awareness by trying harder to think clearly. I got it by lying in the sand doing nothing at all. The pause came first. The clarity came after.

So here’s my invitation for the week. Find your version of the beach. It doesn’t have to be a twenty-minute walk through dunes. It can be five minutes with your coffee before anyone else wakes up, or sitting in the car for a beat before you walk inside. Just pause. Long enough to notice what you’re carrying. And if it just so happens that your practice involves taking a nap, I 100% approve.

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If there’s something specific you’re navigating right now — a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working — coaching is a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Leave a comment

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Good morning, everyone. Have you ever wondered what things are made of?

About a year ago, this question occupied a large portion of my day. I was going through some challenging health issues, which required me to go on an elimination diet. If you’ve ever done one of these, then you know how difficult it is. To truly adhere to them, you have to read every ingredient on every label of processed food to make sure it doesn’t contain the very thing you’re trying to eliminate. The constant monitoring is exhausting. So another approach is to eliminate processed foods all together. You just figure out what the core ingredients are in the foods you want to eat, and then cook it all yourself. That’s the only way to make sure everything is “safe.” Choose every ingredient that goes into the dish.

I was reminded of this experience this week, when I reflected on our theme for the month: Intention, moving from reactive living to intentional choosing. So today, I’m going to share the lessons I learned standing in the condiment aisle of the grocery store, reading through a list of ingredients.

My elimination diet was complicated. It wasn’t one you could find in a self-help cookbook. Low-carb and low-histamine meant I had to eliminate all sugar, wheat, and grains, plus all slow-cooked, fermented, and aged foods, and random stuff that could trigger a histamine reaction, like tomatoes, avocado, and spinach. It was very confusing.

Some things I had to eliminate forever. Goodbye, Olive Garden never-ending pasta bowl and breadsticks. So instead, I found great joy in being creative and concocting alternative versions of my favorite dishes. A great example was sauces. Some were easy and better homemade. Mayonnaise, I’m thinking of you. Others were trickier. My white whale was ketchup. No matter how hard I tried, roasted carrots and red peppers could never give me the same taste and texture as the basic bottle. Tomatoes are an essential ingredient.

Unfortunately, my elimination diet was not a choice. I wasn’t trying to lose twenty pounds, feel younger, or make my skin glow. I was trying to get my body back to doing basic functions, like circulating blood to both my brain and my feet at the same time. For people living with chronic conditions, this question of what the essential ingredients are can quickly move beyond the scope of food and become a question about your life in general. If I can’t function or perform like I used to, then who am I?

It’s very easy to go through life attaching our identities to the roles we play or the relationships we’re in. I am a basketball player, a mom, an accountant, a wife, a CEO, a used car salesman, a teacher, a grandfather, an able-bodied person — you fill in the blank. It’s only when those relationships end, the roles change, or the experience is over that we’re forced to face the reality of who we truly are.

These questions, “Who am I?” and “What should I do?” are two of the most basic human questions out there. Great philosophers, spiritual teachers, and psychologists have all explored them for centuries. In their search, a similar theme appears: the self is not singular. Part of us reacts, and part of us can notice the reaction. Who I am, my identity, and what I do, my behavior, are not the same thing. But just like any recipe, the ingredients you put into one will impact the flavor of the other.

When I was sick, I believed some terrible things about my identity, including that I am: Imperfect, Worthless, Useless, Invisible, Depleted, Unsafe, Trapped, Weak, and Neglected.

Those beliefs then caused me to behave in equally terrible ways, where I tried to: Perfect, Flatter, Perform, Glamorize, Withdraw, Doubt, Plan Excessively, Control, and Appease.

None of it worked. Believing those things, or acting that way, didn’t make life any better. It was all just a reaction to what I was experiencing in the moment: my body failing. Which meant the real ingredients of what makes us human at our core had to be something much different. So I chose to test out a different recipe. I began to believe that I am: Integrity, Love, Worth, Authenticity, Insight, Faith, Possibility, Strength, and Unity.

There is a difference between believing you are loved and believing you are love. One is consuming an ingredient; the other is being that ingredient. It’s the difference between saying I like hot sauce and saying I am spicy, baby!

It changed everything, including my behavior. Suddenly I was: Steadfast, Gracious, Transparent, Stable, Engaged, Courageous, Sober, Vulnerable, and Present.

My body no longer had to perform to be worthy. I could be courageous and vulnerable, because my identity was rooted in faith and strength, not doubt and weakness. The list of ingredients shifted, and it looked like this:

Today, I’m back to eating ketchup. The carbs are still a problem, but the histamine intolerance seems to have subsided. I no longer have to stand in the condiment aisle figuring out the basic ingredients of what things are made of. The reason for that, I believe, is that I figured out what I am made of.

This list of core ingredients is pretty short and simple. But it’s the difference between intentionally choosing life, regardless of your circumstances, versus reacting to the circumstances of your life. A recipe that many people get backwards.

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If there’s something specific you’re navigating right now — a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working — coaching is a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone, welcome back. Today I write to you from a tired, sore body. I spent the weekend helping some friends demolish and remodel their basement. It was utterly exhausting. You know the type of tired where muscles you forgot existed remind you of their presence when you attempt to do normal things, like sit on the toilet? Yeah, that type. Personally, it’s my favorite type of tired. When else are we given evidence that we accomplished something really big?

The weekend got me thinking about transformation and the level of effort it takes to make dramatic changes. Today, I want to share with you some of those insights.

I love big projects, particularly home improvement ones. So when my friends called and asked if I would join their work party for a weekend basement remodel, of course I said yes. And of course, I also convinced them to take on more work than they originally planned. Which leads us to the first lesson.

Insight #1 - Set an intention

Their intention was to transform the room. It started off with just painting, but I knew that wasn’t going to give them the dramatic change they truly wanted. They needed new flooring. The carpet was old and had been through a lot. To give the space a fresh feel, it needed to go. The problem was we were working on a limited timeline and budget. Rather than assuming new floors were out of reach, we needed to dig deeper. Literally.

Insight #2 - Ask questions

“What’s under the carpet?” I asked. The answer was concrete. This gave us something to work with. Stained concrete is a modern look that’s very inexpensive to achieve.

This is the tricky part about life. You don’t know what you don’t know. We can’t choose something different until we’re aware of our options. Often, becoming aware of something begins with being curious and asking questions. It also may mean relying on others to point you in the right direction.

Insight #3 - Trust yourself (and your friends)

We didn’t start ripping out carpet. We started with the painting, like they originally planned. It looked great and did make a huge difference. It also gave them a sense of confidence, accomplishing something visibly stunning. So by the end of day one, when I said, “Can we just take a peek under this carpet and see what the concrete looks like?” they agreed. The little patch turned into a bigger patch, and by the end of the day they had committed to a second day of hard work.

Doing something new can be incredibly scary, especially if you’re not sure what skills it takes to accomplish the task, or what the results will be. My favorite definition of trust comes from Rachel Botsman, who defines it as “a confident relationship with the unknown.” Trust is an act of risk-taking. It’s not about ensuring everything will go right. It’s about knowing that you will be okay, even if everything goes wrong. Trusting yourself means believing in your own ability to figure it out.

Insight #4 - Put in the work

I am so grateful for my friends’ willingness to do the work. Our second day was dirty, dusty, smelly, and physically exhausting. We ripped big pieces of carpet, scraped off tacky glue, used a crowbar to pop nails out of the floor, and cleaned it all with some sort of chemical concoction that I’m pretty sure will turn you into a supervillain if you fall into a vat of the stuff.

Transformation isn’t always easy breezy. It can be difficult, look messy, and be exhausting. At times, you’ll need to take a break and catch your breath. But you don’t stop. You have to keep going and do the work.

Insight #5 - Reveal your heart

I loved doing this dirty job with my friends. Each day I was grateful that my body could do it, something it couldn’t have done not that long ago. And more importantly, my heart was full, helping my friends transform this part of their lives. That heart was visible in the room. Literally.

When we popped nails out of the floor with a crowbar, it left divots. Not ordinary divots. Heart-shaped ones. And not just one. As we worked our way around the room, they kept appearing, all along the edges of the wall, like the room itself was being surrounded by love.

That’s a bit more than a coincidence.

This was no longer just a basement remodel. It was a transformation that symbolized the disruption of old patterns and the welcoming in of something new.

The whole experience became the seed for something bigger I’ve been wondering about: how do we move from reactive living to intentional choosing? So much of our lives are based on patterns we inherited, but didn’t necessarily choose. So this month, we’re going to pull back the carpet, if you will, and see what we can discover underneath. I hope you'll join me this month as we explore our theme: Intention. See you next week!

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If there’s something specific you’re navigating right now — a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working — coaching is a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Welcome back to another week of learning what it means to Become We. Yesterday, I woke up to the tragic news that there was a shooting in Seattle, at the Bite of Seattle food festival. While these types of events have become common, it always hits differently when it happens in your state or city.

Each time I read news articles about such events, there’s one predictable phrase, said over and over, that catches my attention: thoughts and prayers. Those words make me have a lot of questions. What does that phrase mean? Do the people saying it actually have a prayer or meditation practice, or are they just saying it to gain political points? What do prayer practices of most people look like? And probably the most uncomfortable question of all: what difference does it make anyway?

Of course, nobody talks about this. So today, we’re going to. In continuing our theme for the month of July, Practice, we’re turning to prayer and meditation: what is it, why has it shown up as a practice in every culture ever recorded, and what does it look like in different forms? I’m going to share about my own personal practice and then, I want to hear about your experiences too.

What are Thoughts & Prayers?

Let's start with a definition. It may be blasphemy to some, but I like to combine prayer and meditation into a singular frame, defined as:

A practice of sustained, directed attention — whether silent or expressed vocally/physically — oriented toward one's own inner state, another person, or a higher power, undertaken with some degree of intentional withdrawal from ordinary task-focused thought.

I do this because I've come to believe prayer and meditation are two names people give to the same underlying activity, shaped by the vocabulary of their culture. The definition covers three things that happen, regardless of tradition:

• Focused attention — a prime objective of the practice is to focus attention, breaking away from the scattered default of our own minds. This doesn’t require silence or stillness. It can be silent and seated, or it can be vocal, chanted, moving, even physically expressive. What makes it count is the direction of the attention.

• A relational target — the attention is oriented toward one of three things: one’s own inner state (reflection, centering, self-examination), another person (intercession, holding someone in mind, wishing them well), or something experienced as larger than the self (God, the sacred, the universe, consciousness, however named). Any one of these counts. Many practices move between all three in a single session.

• A deliberate step out of ordinary thought — there has to be some intentional shift away from task-focused, problem-solving mental activity, even briefly. This is what separates “praying” or “meditating” from just thinking hard about something.

Using this definition, most Americans, more than we might expect, participate in some kind of practice. Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found that 63% of U.S. adults engage in at least one spiritual practice. It can take many forms, including quiet reflection, meditating, spending time in nature, or the spiritual aspects of yoga. Separately, 44% of Americans say they pray at least once a day.

Consistency Across Cultures

The practice of prayer and meditation isn’t a modern psychological phenomenon. Across nearly every human civilization on record, there is some form of prayer or meditation. From Vedic contemplative traditions, to Buddhist meditation, the Desert Fathers’ silent prayer in the early Christian church, Sufi dhikr, and Jewish contemplative practice, the tools are abundant and widespread. Amazingly, these traditions developed largely independently of one another, often with no contact between them, and yet they arrived at strikingly similar practices at their core: repetition, a withdrawal from ordinary thought, and sustained attention turned toward something beyond the day’s tasks.

There is a universal struggle in being human, and stepping out of task-mode isn’t easy. Maybe that’s why all traditions landed on similar tools. Think about it, there’s no other role we play indefinitely. You can’t be a boss, a spouse, a parent, or an employee 100% of the time. It’s impossible. If you tried, it would immediately lead to burnout. And yet, here we all are walking around on the planet, wearing these meat suits, and being human every moment of every day. It’s exhausting.

I like to think of prayer and meditation as sort of turning on the “do not disturb” button of life. It allows me a moment to pause and rest, re-focus my attention, and become liberated from merely reacting to my environment out of habit.

What bothers me so much about using the term “thoughts and prayers” in public is that because we don’t talk about the actual practice in today’s society, it no longer feels genuine. Are they invoking something with real roots, or just saying words with no action behind them? The only real way to find out is to reveal the practice. So let me model that and show you mine.

My Practice

Here’s what my normal morning looks like.

Pre-meditation/Prayer Preparation

Wake Up — I’m an early riser, up every day around 6:00 a.m. The first thing I do is water myself like a plant and drink a glass of water.

Invite in the Light — Next, I open the curtains in the bedroom and greet the day. I take a moment to look out the window and observe the natural world.

Coffee and Spelling Bee — Then, I make a cup of coffee and play the New York Times game Spelling Bee. For a dyslexic person who loathed and often failed spelling tests in elementary school, this might seem surprising. And yet, I find that playing the game each day really helps warm up my brain and judge how good of a night’s sleep I got. Some days the neurons in my mind fire easily and the words flow freely. Other days, I feel like my brain is being pulled through the mud. This helps me decide what type of prayer or meditation to do next.

Sit on the Floor — Finally, I prepare for prayer or meditation. My preferred location is sitting on the floor of my bedroom, cross-legged. I usually do so in silence, but sometimes I’ll use headphones and play some binaural beats.

Meditation/Prayer Practices

Centering Prayer — On most days I choose to practice Centering Prayer. This is a silent practice that involves letting go of your thoughts in order to rest in the presence of the divine. It has mystical roots in a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous English mystic in the 14th century. To practice it, you pick a short word or phrase that shows your desire to experience and be with God. When you find your mind wandering, you simply breathe and say that word. My sacred word is “Be.”

Loving-Kindness — Some mornings, I wake up feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. In those cases, I practice the Buddhist tradition that focuses entirely on cultivating and projecting unconditional goodwill, love, and peace out into the world. Sometimes, I focus specifically on someone I know who is struggling or who may be in need of loving intention flowing their way. Other times I embrace the ripple effect and send good intentions first to myself, then to loved ones, a neutral person, a difficult person, and eventually all living beings across the universe.

Life Visioning — If my mind is particularly buzzy and I feel the need to actively seek out guidance on something, I’ll choose to do a meditation called Life Visioning, a practice created by Michael Bernard Beckwith. First, I calm my mind and enter a quiet space. Then I ask a series of questions, including “What is the highest vision for ____ right now?” and “What is trying to emerge through me?”

For each of these practices, I give myself about 30 minutes, or until I get interrupted by either a 12-year-old asking for breakfast or a dog licking my face.

Does it make a difference? For me, it absolutely does. Rather than moving through my day as a reactive “I,” unaware of my own patterns, prayer and meditation help me consciously choose how I show up in the world. On the mornings I skip the practice, I’m more self-absorbed, less gracious, and feel less connected to the greater “we.”

I want to point out a piece of my practice that I believe is crucial. Prayer and meditation for me are not about asking for my own desires to be fulfilled by some Santa Claus in the sky. Quite the contrary. Prayer and meditation are about intentionally practicing my own receptivity to experiencing the divine. I’m not asking something or someone else to magically change the circumstances on earth. Rather, I’m opening myself up to knowing how I can change, and how change can come through me. It’s not about outsourcing responsibility to something or someone else. It’s about connecting with something greater than myself, and owning my contribution to the larger “we.”

Your Practice

Back at the start of this essay, I wondered whether the people saying “thoughts and prayers” actually have a practice of their own. It turns out the numbers say yes, more likely than not. Most Americans do have some version of a prayer or meditation practice. But statistics can’t tell you what that practice actually means to someone, what it’s done for their daily life, or whether it’s shaped their beliefs and behavior in any real way.

So this week, I would love to hear from you directly. If you already have a practice, however small, however unofficial, I’d love to know what it is and how you found it. And if you don’t, no judgment there either, that’s its own honest answer. Let’s talk about it in the comments. So what’s your practice?

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If there’s something specific you’re navigating right now, a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn’t working, coaching is a space to map what’s actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Welcome to July. To begin this week’s essay, I want to start by giving a special shout-out to those who joined us at the Becoming We dinner this past Saturday. Eight of us gathered in the beautiful Garden of Peace to share a meal and have a conversation about what it means to Become We. I can’t stop thinking about the meaningful evening and the insightful wisdom that was shared around the table. You can thank the group for inspiring this month’s theme — Practice.

One of the ideas that surfaced at the dinner was the recognition that Becoming We is a double-edged sword. Ultimately, it’s about learning to come together as a society across our differences and conflicts and learn how to be as one. But achieving this vision requires that we each go inward and experience the multiplicity of our own selves. We must come to know that we are not a singular “I” forced to automatically react to the world, but instead a constellation of gifts and talents that can consciously choose how to be present. That, my friends, is called awareness. To become aware, it’s helpful to have a map.

Each of us has patterns. A familiar lens through which we experience the world. The challenge is that we tend to return to it again and again, as if it were the only option available. And because we’re living inside it, we often don’t realize how much of the map we aren’t seeing.

That’s what I want to demonstrate for you this month. The tools and practices that I personally use to navigate my map. These are the same tools I use with coaching clients, adapted to whatever their particular pattern turns out to be. Think of this as an invitation to put Becoming We into action.

We will start with a practice about time.

Orientation to Time

Did you know that each person has a different way of experiencing time? That’s right, my view of time is probably much different than yours. We all have a pattern to how our attention and focus naturally drift — past, present, or future.

I’m a future thinker, which means as I go about my normal day, my attention naturally flows to what’s coming next — goals, possibilities, obstacles to overcome, and horizons to reach. I often experience the present as a stepping stone to the future.

My late husband, Satish, was different. He lived in the present, which meant he was absorbed in what was happening in the moment. He was constantly correcting, responding, and scanning the immediate environment. The present was his home and sometimes a prison, leaving him little bandwidth for reflection or future visioning.

Neither one of us was past-oriented. For these folks, a majority of attention is focused on what has already happened — analyzing previous experiences, processing what was lost, and making sense of the past. Here, the present can feel like a stepping stone to something uncertain.

There is no right way to be. We’re all just different. What causes problems, however, is being unaware of which orientation you’re operating from. In one-on-one relationships, two people may be operating from totally different time orientations simultaneously and not know it. A past-oriented person can be stuck processing what happened last week, while the future-oriented person has already moved on to planning next month. They are having two different conversations. The result is a persistent sense of not quite connecting or talking past each other without understanding why.

This happened to Satish and me quite often. He would be judging something in the present moment and really obsess over it. Mosquitos and flies were a great example of something that drove him absolutely bonkers. To me, bugs are annoying, but they aren’t that big of a deal. Why? Because I just escape into the future where the bug zapper has already got them. Boom, problem solved. Meanwhile, he remained in the present moment, being tormented by the creatures.

This dynamic doesn’t stay contained to individual relationships. It shows up at work, too. Maybe you’ve sat in a meeting and felt quietly out of step, like you were arguing about the decision when really you were just reading the clock differently. The colleague who keeps bringing up what happened last time isn’t being negative. The one who’s already three steps into the future isn’t being reckless. And the one trying to keep everyone focused on today isn’t being small-minded. There are just three time orientations and no shared language about it. Worth noticing next time you’re in a room that feels stuck.

Knowing your orientation is the first step toward choosing it consciously rather than being run by it.

Another Layer

Now here’s where my map gets even more complicated. I also experience aphantasia, a neurological variation where a person has difficulty consciously visualizing mental imagery. If you ask someone to imagine a red apple, most people will see a vivid shape floating in their mind’s eye. I can’t easily do that. Instead, I think of the concept of an apple — knowing it is red, round, and crunchy — but the image itself is fuzzy. While a lot of people can see their memories of the past or their visions of the future playing like a movie, I don’t. The present moment is the only thing I can see right in front of my face.

My brain spends a lot of time in the future, but not in an imaginary way. The scientific name for this is episodic foresight — a future that is built entirely on concepts, logic, meaning, and factual projections rather than a mental movie. When I escape to the bug-free world, it’s not because I visualized the bug zapper obliterating the mosquitoes; it’s because I factually know that if we had a bug zapper, it would do its job.

Aphantasia is rare; something like four percent of people experience it. The older I get, the more I understand what a gift it has been. A friend of mine recently shared that she was anxious about driving over a bridge. She described that in her mind, she could see a future where the bridge collapsed, and her car plunged into the water, in vivid detail. She felt the imagined future in her present body, and it showed up as anxiety and fear. Other people carry real PTSD from the past. Both the past and the future can come in loops. Images come uninvited, and the nervous system responds as if they’re happening now.

I have my own trauma story. And yet I do not experience looping. I have to work hard to call up images of the past. It’s not automatic. Some researchers think this lack of visual intrusion may explain why aphantasia can act as a buffer against certain kinds of anxiety, trauma, and PTSD.

I don’t say any of this to suggest I got the better deal. I got a different deal. And realizing how different our inner experience can be, even when our outer experiences are similar, humbles me. It also breaks my heart a little when I think about how many people are looping through something in their mind right now, without any idea that it doesn’t have to work that way forever.

The Time Traveling Vacuum

Now you might also be wondering, “How can you write and share these very detailed and personal stories if visualizing the past is difficult?” Good question! Here enters the practice.

One of the reasons I love writing each week is that it helps me practice the time orientation that is most difficult for me — the past. I generally have a sense of the meaning I want to share through story, but the story itself can be more difficult to visualize. So I have to really practice recalling and imagining it. Sometimes I do that through meditation, where I sit with my eyes closed and invite the images to come. But another way I do this is by focusing my energy while completing a menial task, like vacuuming.

We have a very fluffy dog, whose tail attracts leaves, which are then transported through the doggy door and into our living room. Thus, my life requires a lot of vacuuming. One day, I realized that the hum of the vacuum made my mind wander. So rather than letting it wander into the future, I decided to intentionally focus on the past. It worked pretty well. So now it’s my daily practice. When vacuuming, I intentionally focus my mind on the past, essentially turning my vacuum into a time machine.

The Pause Practice

I call activities like this a Pause Practice. So this week, I want to offer some Pause Practices that you can do to help identify your relationship to time.

The goal isn’t to change your orientation. It’s to become aware of it, so you can intentionally choose it rather than be run by it. This means shifting from time happening to you — pulling you into the past, present, or future automatically — to choosing where your attention lives based on what the moment actually calls for.

Questions for Your Pause Practice:

• What time orientation am I operating from right now?

• Am I defaulting to my pattern, or is this what this moment actually calls for?

• What time orientation do I want to be in right now?

Activities for Your Pause Practice:

Try these to help you become more aware of your orientation to time.

• Take a time walk. Go for a walk with no destination and no agenda. Notice where your mind goes — past, present, or future. Don’t try to change it. Just observe which direction time pulls you when nothing is demanding your attention.

• Do a time meditation. Sit quietly and set an intention before you begin — you might choose to reflect on the past, rest in the present, or envision the future. Notice how natural or effortful each feels depending on your orientation.

• Write a time journal entry. Pick one orientation and write from it deliberately — a memory, a present-moment observation, or a future vision. Then try the other two. Notice which flows most easily and which feels like work.

• Practice a creative pause. Draw, doodle, play music, or do something with your hands with no time goal. Notice what time orientation your mind settles into when it’s free to wander.

• Create a time machine. While doing a menial task (like doing the dishes or vacuuming), re-focus your attention on a specific time orientation.

  ---

Share Your Experience

I would love to hear how this goes for you. You can share your experience in the comments below. I’ll see you back here next week for another Pause Practice. Until then, enjoy the journey of Becoming We.

Leave a comment

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If there's something specific you're navigating right now, a decision, a transition, a dynamic with someone that isn't working, coaching is a space to map what's actually happening and figure out what to do next. Book a free 30-minute intro call and we'll talk through whether it's the right fit. Or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Subscribe now

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Today we wrap up this month’s theme — Pause — and I have a story to share about what it actually looks like to pause in the moment.

Next week is my birthday. I’m at the point of midlife where my eyebrows are starting to disappear. I expected the hair on my head to go white, but my eyebrows? Do people even dye their eyebrows? I have no beauty routine, so I guess they’ll just slowly blend into my face. Whatever. Happy birthday to me!

Anyways, a few days ago, I was given an early birthday gift. Not just an ordinary gift. A really big, incredibly expensive gift. Such a big gift that my gut reaction was to say, “What?! No, that’s too much.”

Have you ever been given a gift like that? Where your body goes into shock, and your mind starts doing funky things?

Mine definitely did. As much as I write about taming the egoic mind, in this moment it completely took over and started arguing with itself. Here’s how it went:

Ego #1: No. Reject this gift. You are not worthy of it. What did you do to deserve it? Nothing.

Ego #2: Well, it has been a difficult year. Remember everything you’ve overcome. Maybe you deserve it a little.

Ego #1: But this is so much money. You don’t deserve THAT level of kindness.

Ego #2: You did just spend a ridiculous amount on the dog’s knee surgery. Maybe this is the universe paying you back.

Ego #1: Give me a break. Lots of people pay big bills and get nothing in return. You’re not special.

Ego #2: What about all the health stuff? Think about how much you’ve spent on medical bills this year. This could be payback for some of that.

Ego #1: That’s the same argument as the dog.

And on and on they went.

Meanwhile, a different part of me was watching the whole conversation happen. We’ll call this piece Awareness. It had been quiet, but eventually it decided to speak up — and when it did, everything stopped.

Awareness: Why does the ego think this gift has to be earned?

I paused. That was a good question.

Awareness: A real gift is an act of love. Do you agree?

Yes. Of course I agree.

Awareness: So is love conditional? Does it have to be earned?

Damn. No.

Awareness: Do you understand grace at all?

What the heck was my egoic mind doing? It was so busy calculating whether I deserved this that it couldn’t simply receive it. The ego’s job is to keep score. And grace doesn’t keep score. Those two things cannot exist in the same moment.

So I went quiet. And out of the silence, eventually came two words: thank you.

For a few days afterward, I kept sitting with why receiving the gift had been so hard. Conceptually, I know love is unconditional. As a mom, I know what it feels like to give without keeping score. Why is it so much harder to be on the receiving end?

I think it’s because somewhere along the way, I was conditioned to believe that I am the author of my own story. Even when things go wrong, I can still be in charge, still overcome, still prove something. When I push through difficulty, it reinforces the narrative: I am strong. I did that.

But grace? Grace dissolves that story entirely. The identity my ego has worked so hard to construct — capable, resilient, self-sufficient — melts away like an ice cream cake left out in the sun.

And that’s terrifying. Because if I didn’t earn this, then my worth was never something I was building in the first place. It was already there. It has always been there. Free.

That is the power of the pause. When we learn to recognize the patterns and stories of the egoic mind, we create space for Awareness. And once we can see what the ego is doing — really see it — it loses its grip. Only from that place of unguarded openness can unconditional love be received. Like a gift.

Once we can accept it, there’s nothing left to do but say thanks.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

A Quick Note & Reminder

There will be no essay next week, as I am taking the week off to celebrate said birthday. I will return on July 14th with a new essay and theme for July.

That means this is your last chance to sign up for the dinner I’ll be hosting on July 11th, from 5:30 - 8:00. It’s at the beautiful Garden of Peace in Gig Harbor, WA.

If you’ve ever wished we could sit down and talk, this is that moment. Good food, good company, and a real conversation about Becoming We.

RSVP is required. And if July 11th doesn’t work but you’re interested, let me know — if there’s enough interest, I’ll host a Zoom session too. I hope to see you soon!

RSVP for the Dinner

Zoom Request Form

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this essay names a pattern you recognize in yourself, that’s exactly the work she does with people one-on-one. Hit the message button if you’re curious, or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Hi everyone. This month we’ve been sitting with the theme of Pause, and today I want to share a story of something that happened this week that did exactly that — gave me pause.

Did you know that Sunday was a double-duty special day? Not only was it Father’s Day, but it was also the first day of summer. The overlap only occurs every decade or so. The next time the two days will intersect will be 2037. To celebrate, we went for a boat ride. The perfect combination: one of my Dad’s favorite activities, sunshine, and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. We even saw a mama seal and her baby sitting on a log. Aren’t they amazing?! The miraculous beauty of this place we get to call home never ceases to delight me.

After a lovely lunch and enjoying nature, we finished our journey and headed back to the marina. The boat ramp has a dock with two ramps. We pulled up to one side and waited as my Dad went to get the truck and trailer. Meanwhile, another boat approached from the other side. It was, well, let’s just say interesting.

This boat was an old jalopy that looked like it had been through a lot. On board was a rambunctious family — two parents and five kids, all probably under the age of 8. To say these kids had a tremendous amount of energy would be an understatement. They were jumping up and down on the seats, hanging on the railing, dangling their feet and heads over the edge, all while their Dad was trying to dock the vessel. As soon as they were safely tied to the dock, the kids jumped out and started running around everywhere, like a pack of wild...I don’t know...something.

“I’m going swimming!” one girl yelled, which was quickly followed by the Mom shouting “No, you’re not!” as she grabbed the strap on her life jacket and yanked her to the dock mid-jump. Two boys ran over to a piling that had mussels growing on it. With their tiny fingers, they ripped off large chunks with what seemed like superhuman strength. One boy held the clump above his head and shouted “We found dinner!” as the other attempted to eat them raw, sashimi style. The dad shouted back, “Stop destroying the wildlife! That is not for eating!” The old, tired boat looked as if it wanted to say, “Yes, they did this to me.”

Then the Mom turned to the Dad and said, “I’m going to go get the car and strap them all in their seats. That way you can work on getting the boat cleaned up in peace.” He responded with a smile, a nod, and a simple “Thank you.”

As the kids followed the Mom to the car and the Dad was left by himself, I chuckled and said, “umm...Happy Father’s Day?” — more question than statement. He laughed and said it had actually been a very fun day. He then proceeded to share about his family and their journey, and this is the part that gave me pause.

As he spoke, he referred to each of them by name. Not “my wife” but “Alley.” Not “my kid” but “Jackson.” Not once did he speak about them in relation to himself — only by their actual names. It was strange to hear, because of course I didn’t know this family, so I had to piece together who was who. The conversation felt unexpectedly intimate. Like we were long-time friends, not strangers at a boat ramp.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day. Something about it kept pulling at me, and I couldn’t quite name why.

Eventually, I landed on a question: how much of my own language is possessive? My house. My kid. My car. My dog. My shoes. My job. My hopes. My dreams. My. My. My.

How much of life have I framed solely based on its relationship to me?

I don’t know what to do with that question. Or if there’s anything to do at all. But I think that’s the point of pausing — not to reach a conclusion, but to open ourselves up to new ways of seeing. To let something catch our attention and sit with it long enough to wonder.

So this week, I’m grateful for boating dads. My own, who has helped me navigate so much of life. And this complete stranger, who — without trying — offered me a completely new way of looking at things.

There’s always more to notice.

Share

Leave a comment

Dinner Reminder

On July 11th, from 5:30 - 8:00, I’m hosting a dinner at the beautiful Garden of Peace in Gig Harbor, WA, and you’re invited.

If you’ve ever wished we could sit down and talk, this is that moment. Good food, good company, and a real conversation about Becoming We.

RSVP is required. And if July 11th doesn’t work but you’re interested, let me know — if there’s enough interest, I’ll host a Zoom session too.

RSVP for the Dinner

Zoom Request Form

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this essay names a pattern you recognize in yourself, that’s exactly the work she does with people one-on-one. Hit the message button if you’re curious, or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Welcome back! A special hello to those who are newly joining. Each week, I write an essay exploring what it means to be on the human journey of Becoming We. This month’s theme is Pause, and today I want to talk about one of the most important pieces of pausing—our attention.

My normal life routines are currently on pause because my attention is on the World Cup. In case you didn’t know, I am a huge soccer fan, and I love, love, love the World Cup. To prove it, here’s a picture of the scheduling board in our kitchen. Forget about what time camp starts or when that dentist appointment is; there are more important things happening right now.

If you’re not into soccer, then this may seem a bit intense, so let me explain. My love of the World Cup is less about soccer and more about collective attention.

Yesterday’s game between Spain and Cabo Verde is the perfect example. To fully grasp what I’m about to throw down, you need some back story. Spain is a soccer powerhouse. Many people, including me, have predicted they will win the whole tournament. They also have Lamine Yamal, who is arguably one of the best soccer players in the world. At the age of 18, this kid’s talents are unbelievable. Meanwhile, Cabo Verde is the national soccer team for Cape Verde, a tiny cluster of islands off the western coast of Africa that most people have never even heard of. The population of the whole country is approximately 550,000 people, three-quarters the size of the city of Seattle. And instead of an 18-year-old superstar, they have a 40-year-old goalkeeper who plays in a second division league in Portugal. This is the team’s first World Cup.

Imagine being a player for the Cabo Verde team. You get to represent your country, a place that most people don’t even know exists, for the first time on the world stage. And with the luck of the draw, your opening game is against arguably the best team in the world. Talk about spotlight and pressure.

Nobody had much faith in the newbies. Most commentators predicted the game would be a blowout with Spain winning by 6 or 7 goals. But yesterday, Cabo Verde achieved the most exciting results that can only happen in soccer—a zero-zero tie! While that might seem irritatingly boring, it was the opposite. By far, it was the most exciting game I have watched of the entire tournament.

The magic wasn’t because of soccer. Spain still dominated with wild statistics—23 shots to Cabo Verde’s 6, 62 percent of the possession, 764 passes to Cabo Verde’s 275, and 11 corners to Cabo Verde’s 1. What was incredible about the game was Cabo Verde’s grit and determination. With the attention of the world on them, those players exuded pure pride. They took a beating, but didn’t give in. They would literally get knocked down and pop right back up. There was an energetic force inside each of them, determined to not stop. Each player clearly knew the incredible feat they were attempting. Not one single player could do it on their own. They had to do it together. They sacrificed their individual bodies for the good of the whole.

As the game progressed, the entire stadium and the internet became captivated. Shot after shot was blocked. The 40-year-old keeper made seven saves. With each new save, the crowd got louder. A true David and Goliath story was emerging, and the fans were engrossed. Could they do it? Could they stop Spain? Towards the end of the game, the players looked exhausted. “Hold on!” I found myself shouting at the television. “You can do it!” I imagined people all over the world yelling from their couches. When the referee blew the final whistle, the stadium erupted in cheers. Most of the fans came in wearing Spain jerseys, but they definitely left rooting for their supposed opponent.

What makes this possible is something structural about the sport itself. These players aren’t wearing their country’s colors because they hate everyone else’s. They’re wearing them because, for this tournament, they have been deemed the best in the world, and they get a unique opportunity to represent their country proudly. That patriotism is real. But it has to be held loosely. When this tournament ends, these same players will scatter back across the globe, playing alongside and against each other in club leagues that are all mixed. The man you battled today is your teammate next month. Nationalism can’t take root here because the whole ecosystem would collapse if it did. That’s why, at the end of the game, you saw players exchanging jerseys with each other. The ultimate gesture of mutual respect, sportsmanship, and admiration.

Spain’s fans seemed to understand this intuitively. Spain didn’t need this particular win. They will most likely win their next game and move on in the tournament. Somewhere in the stands, that registered. The collective attention shifted towards where the meaning was concentrated, and so everyone contributed to helping Cabo Verde do something exquisite. Fans could have faith in their national team and also recognize when history was being made. That’s not blind loyalty. That’s collective attention for the good of the whole.

That is what I love about the World Cup. We give our attention to the sport, not only because we want to watch amazing soccer, but more so, because we want to witness a great story. One where it’s not just the talent of the players that matters, but the character of their hearts. Where determination, commitment, and teamwork are on full display. In a world that feels increasingly divided, the eleven players on the field remind us what becomes possible when we focus our attention on something greater than ourselves.

If you ask me, it’s a pretty great example of Becoming We.

Share

Leave a comment

Before you go

Last week I announced something I’ve been moving toward for a long time. On July 11th, I’m hosting a dinner at the beautiful Garden of Peace in Gig Harbor, WA, and you’re invited.

If you’ve ever wished we could sit down and talk, this is that moment. Good food, good company, and a real conversation about Becoming We. The question on the table: is there a community here? People who want more than self-improvement — who feel pulled toward personal transformation in service of something larger?

RSVP is required. And if July 11th doesn’t work but you’re interested, let me know — if there’s enough interest I’ll host a Zoom session too.

RSVP for the Dinner

Zoom Request Form

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this essay names a pattern you recognize in yourself, that’s exactly the work she does with people one-on-one. Hit the message button if you’re curious, or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Subscribe now

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Hi everyone. Welcome back! A special hello to those who are newly joining. Each week, I write an essay exploring what it means to be on the human journey of Becoming We, and each month there is a new theme. This month’s theme is Pause, where we’re exploring what it means to slow down.

There was nobody better at hitting pause than my late husband, Satish. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally, on the remote control. He had this very annoying habit of pausing movies and shows. We would be sitting on the couch together, watching something on the television, and then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he would yell “Wait, pause it!” and then grab the remote out of whoever’s hand was holding it and smash the pause button. I can now recognize this as a symptom of ADHD and a very active and curious brain, but at the time, it was seriously annoying.

He would hear music playing in the show’s background and have to know what song it was. Or, he would see someone using an interesting gadget and need to know if it was a thing that existed in real life. The story was constantly getting interrupted to fulfill his personal curiosity. There were many times when my disdain for this behavior resulted in a wrestling match on the couch battling over the remote and me shouting “YOU…ARE NOT….STOPPING IT AGAIN!”

So it was to my own surprise a few weeks ago when I found myself sitting on the couch with Kushal and suddenly yelled out, " Wait, pause it!” We were watching Season 2 of the live-action version of One Piece. In it, there was a scene that reminded me of the famous fighting sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill. Since that movie came out over 20 years ago, I found myself wondering if my memory was serving me correctly. Kushal obliged to my request to pause. Then, I quickly Googled my suspicion and confirmed that, yes, this particular scene was purposefully directed as an homage to the famous scene in Kill Bill. Tickled, and knowing that Kushal would not understand this reference because the movie was before his time, I pulled up a clip on my phone to show him. With One Piece paused, we watched the original scene in Kill Bill, and Kushal said in amazement and curiosity, “Wait, that’s like the same thing! What is this?” I proceeded to explain the connection, and then we unpaused our show, watching it together from a totally new vantage point.

This, I realized, is what pausing is actually about. Pausing is not a time of non-action where you do nothing. It’s not sitting in a hole without direction. Rather, it’s a brief stop from participating in the existing narrative in order to discover a new perspective.

There are a couple of ways that one might enter into a pause. The first is a huge external disruption. If your microwave gets a short and suddenly explodes and starts a fire, you’re not going to keep sitting on the couch watching the movie while the kitchen burns. The narrative has to stop immediately. You probably will never be able to return to the show in the same way you did before, or if at all. Sometimes, outside forces create a change that is gigantic and unavoidable. These represent the big moments in our lives. The baby being born, the cancer diagnosis, the marriage that ends, the kid who graduates and goes off to college, the move across the country, or the loss of a job. These events change us, whether we recognize it or not. Pausing here is extremely important, so that our becoming is the conscious type and we can move through the difficulty with intention and awareness.

But there is a second reason to pause. Not because external pressure requires it, but because something inside the narrative itself is sending a signal that there is more than meets the eye. A deeper meaning to be discovered. This is what I felt when I paused One Piece. I noticed a pattern that made me curious. Once I paused long enough to follow the thread, I gained a new perspective, which changed how we experienced the narrative itself.

Oftentimes we’re not attuned to these signals. Maybe there’s a feeling in the back of our minds, but we ignore it and let the movie keep playing. Other times, we notice but get stuck thinking about it, never actually hitting the pause button. We sort of live inside our own thoughts while the narrative continues on in the background.

A true pause requires attention, intention, and action. We have to be willing to stop the narrative long enough to explore our intuition. And in that exploration, a change occurs. We gain new insight and perspective, so when we hit the play button, we are viewing the story from a different perspective. The narrative hasn’t changed; we have. That is conscious becoming.

There’s also something powerful in doing this practice together. Kushal was not able to see the connection between Kill Bill and One Piece, because Kill Bill was before his time. He literally didn’t possess the same knowledge I did. But when I was able to stop and point it out to him, it changed his perspective and experience too. What was just a fun show before turned into something with deeper meaning. He felt more connected to the generation before him, as if he were suddenly in on the inside joke.

The Reason to Pause

As I mentioned last week, this season of pause is what our family is currently living through. I'm beginning to wonder if it needs to expand beyond our own couch. Because something has emerged that I can't unsee. In the essay 187: Goodbye Church, I shared about leaving one specific institution in one specific community. But I've come to believe the pattern is much bigger than that.

There's a current running through all our institutions right now (politics, religion, education, media, healthcare, economics) pulling us in a direction most of us don't actually want to go. And yet we keep watching it unfold, as if we're the audience and someone else is holding the remote.

But this isn't a television show. We are not the viewers. We are the directors and the writers, creating the narrative in real time. The way each of us chooses to live, the patterns we interrupt, the quality of presence we bring, the ways we show up in relationship, are all tied to what's happening collectively, at scale. Like a stone thrown in a pool. The ripples expand outward whether we intend them to or not.

I think we need a space to practice splashing.

An Invitation to Pause

On July 11th, I am hosting a dinner, and you are all invited. For years, I've been writing about the patterns unfolding in my life, and they have all pointed toward this: Becoming We is not just a theme for a Substack or a framework for coaching and consulting. It's a vision. A world that has learned to live as We. What I don't yet know is what the right container looks like for people who feel that pull. Is there a community here? Are people longing for a space whose purpose is not simply self-improvement, but personal transformation in service of something larger? That's the thread I want to pull together, and I'd love for you to be part of that conversation.

On this night, we will gather outside at the beautiful Garden of Peace in Gig Harbor, WA, to be in fellowship together. We’ll enjoy good food and drink, get to know one another, and then engage in a visioning session about what Becoming We could be. I’m curious to hear what draws you into these stories each week? What patterns am I noticing that resonate with your experience? What is the highest potential for Becoming We, and how do we get there together?

If you have ever wished we could sit down and have a conversation together, this is your chance. RSVP is required, and you can sign up using the button below. If this date or location does not work for you, but you would like to participate in a conversation, please let me know by filling out the form below. If there’s enough interest, I will host another session via Zoom.

RSVP for the Dinner

Zoom Request Form

I don't know exactly what will emerge from this gathering. But I know this: when we stop paying attention to our own becoming, someone else writes the narrative for us. The world doesn't need more passive viewers. It needs people willing to live consciously, show up differently in their relationships, and trust that those ripples matter. That's what I want to practice. I can’t wait to meet you in person and to see what splashing we can do together.

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this essay names a pattern you recognize in yourself, that’s exactly the work she does with people one-on-one. Hit the message button if you’re curious, or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Leave a comment

Share

This work is 100% reader-supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Welcome to the month of June! An extra welcome to those newly joining. Each week I write an essay exploring what it means to be on the human journey of Becoming We, and each month there is a new theme. Last month we explored Becoming, which I define as the ongoing process of change, conscious or not. Last week, I shared about a huge conscious change in our life, leaving the church. If you haven’t yet done so, you can read about it here. Today, I want to talk about what happens directly after a big monumental shift. And it begins with a story about a hole.

My childhood was pretty magical, for a lot of reasons, one of which was the land we lived on. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, a secluded inlet in the Pacific Northwest. Remembering my childhood is a sensorial experience. The smell of muddy tidal flats, the feel of ice cold water, the sound of the boat engine echoing, the sight of translucent jellyfish drifting along, and the taste of salty seawater.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and last year they did something very significant. They bought the house next door. And then, promptly destroyed it.

The neighboring house should never have been built where it was. Nearly half a century ago the original owners wanted a beautiful waterfront view, so they built the house on top of a hill. Over time, that hill started to erode and eventually the house was sitting on the edge of a cliff. The owner passed away and their family suddenly inherited a huge liability. An uninhabitable house that was at risk of falling into the bay. So when my parents offered to buy the property, it was a win-win for everyone.

Shortly after the property sale closed, a wrecking crew came in and in less than a week the house was gone. It was the strangest thing to watch. While it takes months or years to build a house, destroying one literally took days. And when the demolition was finished, there was nothing left but a giant hole.

So the obvious next question everyone had was, “what are you going to do with this hole?” All the neighbors had opinions on what should happen next. Fill the hole in. Build a new house. Plant trees. Build an infinity pool on the cliff. Landscape. Build a retaining wall. Make a giant slip-and-slide into the water. Okay, that last one was my idea, a carryover childhood dream. Anyways, my Dad, the wise man that he is, had a very simple response. To do nothing.

While everyone else was eager to fill the void and build something new, my Dad had a different perspective. After living on the property for half a century, he knew that the land needed time to settle. The earth had literally been ruptured and torn to pieces. The foundation was still shifting. It wasn’t ready for something new to be built on top of it. What it needed was some stillness.

So they stabilized the land the best they could, and then let it sit through the winter. Giving it a season to move and shift as needed. In the spring, they would see what emerged.

I was reminded of this story in the past few weeks, as it felt like a giant metaphor for what’s been going on in our life. Leaving the church felt so much like that house being torn down. The stable home, which you thought would be there forever, suddenly in a short period of time was no longer standing. What took years to build, and decades of living in, was suddenly all gone in less than a week. We too were left with a giant hole.

When we announced our departure, the public response was similar to the reaction that my parents got about the house, with people wondering what we would do next. There were a lot of opinions on what we should do. Find a new church. Take a yoga class. Write a book on the fall of religion. Meditate. Start a new church.

Ohh how eager humans are to fill holes.

We see it most clearly in relationships. Someone ends a partnership that was painful and shortly after they’re in a new one with the same dynamics. Different person, same problems. Everyone around them can see it, but they can’t. Because they skipped the part where they sat in the hole.

That’s the difference between unconscious becoming and conscious becoming. One rushes to rebuild what’s familiar. The other pauses long enough to ask whether what was familiar was actually working to begin with.

In the weeks since we left, there’s been a strange silence. When I was in the midst of the conflict, my phone was constant. Calls, texts, emails, the hum of drama always nearby. The moment we said we were out, it stopped. The storm continued, I just wasn’t in it anymore. And I noticed something curious inside me: a faint pull to stay connected to it, even knowing I had chosen to step away. I was out of the loop by my own design and it was uncomfortable.

I did do something with that silence, though. I redecorated my office. My son had recently moved rooms, and I’d been planning to take over his old space anyway. It felt like the right moment for a fresh start, a room that was mine. I even painted the walls yellow, which surprised me. I’m not a yellow person. But I wanted a space that reflected light outward rather than absorbed it. Less a room to take things in. More a room to send things out.

That, I think, is the difference. My father’s wisdom wasn’t really “do nothing.” It was “don’t build before the ground is ready.” My pause wasn’t physical stillness. It was a waiting. Tending to something small and close while the larger earth settled.

My parents’ hole is still a hole. Nothing has grown there yet. The soil is mostly concrete and rubble, not exactly fertile ground. But the retaining wall held through the winter. Everything stayed put. Nothing collapsed. And now they’re ready to get to work. They even bought a tractor.

We’re not there yet. Our hole is fresher, our winter more metaphorical. We don’t know how long the season will last. But for now, we’re doing what my Dad said. Letting things settle, stabilizing what we can, and waiting to see what emerges.

That’s the theme for the month of June. Pause. Stillness is an important part of conscious becoming. This month we’re going to look at how slowing down can help us move from forced action to emergent flow. What happens when we put a pause on our egoic desires and make space for something bigger to emerge. That’s the moment we’re living in right now and so that’s what we’ll explore together. I hope you’ll join us.

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this essay named a pattern you recognize in yourself, that's exactly the work she does with people one-on-one. Hit the message button if you're curious, or learn more at followtheknowing.com/coaching.

Share

Leave a comment

This work is 100% reader supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going.

Subscribe now

Hi everyone. Can you believe we’re at the end of May? Today, I have a story to tell. It’s a poignant close to our theme for the month—becoming. I didn’t expect to tell this tale, and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I would. But my own story of becoming doesn’t feel complete without it, so here it goes.

For the past few weeks, I’ve referenced an organization that I was part of that was in the midst of a major conflict. That organization was a church. Not just any church, my church. The place I have called home since the age of 6. It’s where I grew up as a youth, where we got married, where Kushal was baptized, where we celebrated decades of Christmas and Easter celebrations, and where we found loving support during Satish’s death. Last week, after being part of the community for 38 years, it’s also the place where I did one of the hardest things I have ever done in my entire life—walked away and said goodbye.

This is not a story about the conflict. The details and truth of what happened belong to that community. But I will say this much: it followed a predictable pattern. A small minority, threatened by change, chose secrecy over honesty. Harm followed. Leadership chose containment over transparency, hoping to quietly resolve what was quickly becoming unresolvable. The majority of people remained largely unaware that anything was happening and were not given a chance to respond. Instigators caused a wound. Leaders let it fester. And once it became impossible to hide, it was already too late.

And yet, somehow, none of that is the point.

No, this is not a story about the conflict. Rather, this is a story of my own becoming. I define becoming as the ongoing process of change, whether conscious or not. When I trace that thread through my own life, intersecting with faith, it always leads me to the same place. Back to when I was 16 years old.

That summer, I was privileged enough to go on a school trip to Europe, and one stop along the way was Vatican City. Growing up Lutheran, I was eager to see the largest church in the world. I expected to feel inspired. What I felt instead was panic. Pure, inexplicable panic.

I am not someone who experiences anxiety, so the intensity of what hit me was confusing and dramatic. As we moved through the corridors into St. Peter’s Basilica, the scale of the building was overwhelming. Marble floors laid half a millennium ago. Ceilings so high they seemed to dissolve into the atmosphere. The grandeur wasn’t inspiring. It felt like standing inside the physical embodiment of every abuse, every corruption, every harm ever committed in the name of religion. My body knew it before my mind could articulate it. There are remarkably few images of God or Jesus in that building, compared to the massive statues of popes and saints. Century after century of institutional power carved in stone. I could feel what the artists were hired to say: you are small, the church is necessary, you cannot reach the divine without us.

I wasn't buying the message. In that moment, I was convinced that if reincarnation is real, some past life version of me had been tortured in the dungeons of this building. Something primal took over, and I had to escape. I sprinted for the door like a cheetah, leaving my group behind. When I collapsed onto the steps outside, I was panting and soaked in sweat. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew I had to get out.

Sixteen years later, it happened again, almost.

I was pregnant with Kushal, and work brought me back to Italy. My mom joined me for the trip, and of course, I wanted to take her to Rome. Partly for her sake, and partly because I was curious: had I changed?

As we walked into St. Peter’s Basilica, the feeling returned. Smaller this time, not as panic but definite discomfort. The building was exactly as I remembered, but I was different. After all, I was growing a baby. I stood there looking at those towering papal statues and felt my belly. This building, I thought, is irrelevant. Religion and faith are not the same thing. The holiest temple there is, is the body. The only place love really exists is inside each of us. And the only way it can be expressed is through the relationships we have with each other.

I didn’t sprint this time. Instead, I slowly waddled over to my mom, told her I’d be outside, and went to sit down on the same steps where I’d collapsed 16 years earlier. I rubbed my belly and made Kushal a promise: that I would love him unconditionally and that I would never let an institution define who he was or what he was to become.

Fast forward thirteen years to last Sunday, when our church held an emergency membership meeting.

Both pastors had just announced their resignations, and the congregation, most of whom were hearing about the conflict for the first time, gathered to make sense of it. I had known about all of this for months. I’d been deep inside it, trying to help, in a way that had become all-consuming. I already knew how it would unfold. So I stood in the back of the room, near the exit.

And then I watched it happen in real time. Good people, loving people, defaulting to their deepest patterns. Choosing the comfort of false peace over the harder work of naming harm. The very definition of unconscious becoming or as Jesus said, “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

That's when the feeling returned, not as panic or discomfort, but as something more paradoxical. Clarity and sorrow arriving at the same time, each making the other more true.

I stood in that doorway with tears running down my cheeks, and I felt past versions of myself standing beside me.

The sixteen-year-old who sprinted out of St. Peter's Basilica, panting on the steps, who saw it clearly even then: that institutions calcify around power, mistaking their own survival for something holy. She recognized it in the Catholic Church. It took 28 more years to see it in her own. I was only now fully receiving what she already knew.

And the pregnant woman who sat on those same steps sixteen years later, hand on her belly, who had found something the institution never could have given her. That the holiest temple is this body, that love doesn’t live in buildings or doctrines or centuries of carved stone. It lives inside of us. In the spaces between people, in the promises we make and keep, in the relationships we tend to with our whole hearts.

They had both been preparing me for this moment. One taught me what to leave behind. The other showed me what to walk toward.

I didn’t just need to leave this conflict. I had outgrown the institution itself. For 38 years, the church had been scaffolding—the structure that held me up while I was being built. It gave me community, language for the sacred, a place to grieve and celebrate and grow. It did exactly what it was meant to do. But scaffolding is never intended to be permanent. Eventually, we must be able to hold ourselves.

That’s what this was. Not a failure. Not a betrayal. Just the quiet, inevitable moment when the scaffolding began to come down.

So when that familiar voice returned halfway through the meeting, gentle and clear, and said, "It’s time to leave,” I listened. I didn’t run. I went upstairs to find Kushal.

Before the meeting started, I had told him what might happen. That if it came to it, I would come and find him, and we would leave together. He knew the whole story. He understood what was at stake. So when I climbed those stairs to get him, there was no surprise in his eyes. Just a quiet recognition. We walked out together, and he knew exactly what we were walking away from.

That is surrender. Not giving up. Not running away. The conscious recognition that some things are not yours to fix, and that some structures, no matter how beloved, are not meant to hold you forever.

That’s how conscious becoming works, I think. In the quiet accumulation of moments where we choose, deliberately and with open eyes, to release what we’ve outgrown—even when it’s something we loved.

Kushal and I have done a lot of processing this past week. Grief, yes. But also gratitude. Thirty-eight years of belonging doesn't disappear with a rocky ending. The scaffolding held. It did its job. For that I am, and always will be, grateful. I don't know what scaffolding Kushal will need. I suspect it won't look anything like mine. But I do know this: the most sacred space any of us will ever find is not a building. It's wherever unconditional love exists. In the future, that's where we’ll be.

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs it. This work is 100% readers supported. If you value having it in your inbox every week, becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to keep it going. And If you’re ready to go deeper, visit followtheknowing.com/becoming-we

Subscribe now

Greetings everyone. This month, we’ve been exploring Becoming — the ongoing process of change, conscious or not. It has been a long and difficult week, and I’ve been sitting with that last part of that definition. Conscious or not.

Last week, I shared that one of the organizations I’m involved with is in the middle of a major conflict. Well, it came to a crescendo. I don’t have the energy to write about it fully, but I can say this: a familiar pattern played out.

I spent some time going through old Substack essays looking for a quote, and I came across the piece below, which I wrote after our last Presidential election. Re-reading it, I was struck by how the same wounds keep finding us, in different rooms, different years, different faces.

The mechanics of fear, secrecy, and othering that fracture nations also fracture organizations and long-lasting relationships. Becoming We — real, conscious, collective transformation — requires that we name the pattern first because you can’t change what you refuse to see.

I’m sharing it again today, because it still says what needs to be said.

A Special Message About Grief, originally published November 2024

This week, I felt called to write an extra post about the election. If you feel deflated, enraged, saddened, or confused, I hope these words bring comfort. If you feel celebratory, relieved, and victorious, I ask that you read with compassion and curiosity. The resentment and anger that many people are feeling need to be unpacked so that it doesn’t create more division.

I believe this election was never about the candidates. The one thing that Americans can agree on is how much we distrust the government. We are united in the understanding that dishonesty and lies dominate our entire political system. Repeated polling shows that 77 percent of all Americans do not trust the government to do what is right always/most of the time. So why did we put so much weight and importance on a system that we self-admittedly don’t trust? I think politics has become a proxy for the stories we’re crafting about each other.

We live in a moment of incredible change. Population demographics are shifting, our planet is physically morphing, technology is escalating unchecked, and economic inequality is increasing. The amount of change is at the highest peak in all of human history. It took 2.4 million years for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking, but 66 years to go from the first flight to humans landing on the moon. Our minds and bodies are not equipped for the crunched timeline. It is easy to get lost in fear, anxiety, and feeling powerless. Am I still able to control my own destiny? Will the future be one where I belong? These unspoken questions are left unanswered.

There are several ways to deal with the angst. The simplest and easiest coping mechanism is to reject and displace the fear. In this version, we find someone else to blame. We craft false stories about who is causing the hurt and create an “other” to dominate over so that we can regain a sense of control. We embrace messages that promise safety and security by eliminating or restricting the people who are causing the pain. Even if those people are not the troublemakers. The stories are entirely fiction, but we believe them. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy (what I’m now calling the anti-trinity) are fueled by this tactic of othering.

The alternative path is much more complicated. It requires healing. In this version of the story, we must feel our pain to stop inflicting harm on others. We must recognize that our enemy is not each other and break the cycle of hurt. This road requires compassion, repair, and repentance.

For many people who are grieving this election, it’s not about one candidate losing. It’s the sadness and realization that a majority of the population embraced the narrative of fear and othering. As a country, we chose not to take the path of healing. Instead, we reinforced the anti-trinity, even though it has scorched us time and time again. It feels like we are stuck in a cycle of abuse.

We mourn the possibility of a different narrative. We recognize what has been left undone and how little progress has been made. We are tired of being othered and worried about the harm that is yet to come.

Here’s the thing….

Grief is something that I know well. All of this is very familiar. I don’t brag often, but the one thing I’m proud of is how I’ve worked through my own pain of losing my husband unexpectedly. Deep loss changes you. So here are some insights I can offer.

The story isn’t over. There is endless ink in our pens. Each day is an opportunity to write a new narrative. Take time to rest and feel everything — anger, resentment, disappointment, worry, joy, hope, and love.

When you’re ready, let the emotions rise like incense. A burnt offering of your heart.

Change has not given up. It will continue to surge at a fast and furious pace. The wisest among us know that bolstering fear is not an effective solution to manage it. A preferred greeting of Jesus was “be not afraid,” which he repeated approximately 365 times. Maybe that was less a message of comfort and more a cautious warning about how we treat each other when fear flourishes. Othering is a destructive dead end.

The way to manage change is through imagination and creativity. We must find fortitude so that we can build fresh circles of belonging. Ones that can't be dug up from the past, because they don’t exist yet. History is a complicated novel, not a simple blueprint. Thankfully, we’re the ones who get to write the narrative — it’s time to change the story.

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs it. If you’re ready to go deeper, visit followtheknowing.com/becoming-we

Subscribe now

Hi everyone, welcome back to our Becoming We series. For May, we’re exploring the first part of that phrase—Becoming—which I define as the ongoing process of change, conscious or not. Today, I have a very personal story about my own process of becoming. It’s the reason I developed the Becoming We Framework, and why I felt called to share it.

The last four years of my life have been rough.

The catalyst was the unexpected and uninvited event of March 21, 2022. That morning I woke up to find that my husband, Satish, had died in his sleep. The life we had built completely evaporated before breakfast.

It’s a strange thing to know the exact moment your life changes. For many people, change is a slow burn. We go through the motions, unaware of who we’re becoming or why. But when something catastrophic happens, that fuel gets ignited, and life explodes. It can either be a destructive force or a moment of rebirth.

I quickly realized it wasn’t just my circumstances that had changed. I was going to have to change, too.

We all follow certain patterns. My automatic response has always been action first, thinking second, feelings last, if I got around to feelings at all. I mostly pushed them aside. That pattern wouldn’t work this time. The feelings were too big to ignore. If I didn’t process them, they would crush me like a boulder.

So I started writing. The energy of grief needed a way to physically exit my body. With writing, it came out of my heart, through my fingers, onto the page, and then into the community, where it could be metabolized and shared. Writing became a ritual. A new pattern I could practice, over and over. Eventually, I learned to pause my automatic response. The feelings didn’t have to be an afterthought. I could think, act, or feel in whichever order was actually needed.

This new capacity changed how I showed up as a mom.

Kushal is an incredibly resilient kid, but he has patterns too, and I began to wonder if they were affecting his health. Satish’s cause of death was a heart attack. His doctors suspected if it was caused by an undiagnosed genetic condition, and if so, questioned whether he had passed it on to Kushal. So we began working with a cardiologist and geneticist to assess the risk.

Through that process, we learned that this super active kid, whose favorite food is sushi and cucumber and whose body fat percentage is essentially zero, had high cholesterol. Just like his dad.

What followed was a long journey through medical appointments and tests, looking at every fact that might explain Kushal’s results. As his mom, I could see something the doctors couldn’t. Satish’s genes were only part of the story. Kushal had also inherited something from me: the ability to push feelings down. He needed to tend to his body and his soul. Which meant I had to model it and show him how.

So I started talking openly about my own patterns. I told him I was working to give equal weight to the thinking, the feeling, and the doing. He told me he often gets stuck in his head, worrying about the future. We committed to live more in the present, to intentionally celebrate the past, and to make sure his dad was never forgotten.

Slowly, I could see a change. About a year later, the doctors could see it too. His elevated cholesterol was coming down. The results were so dramatic that at one appointment, a nutritionist asked, “Kushal, what have you done differently? Did you change your diet or start exercising more?”

His diet hadn’t changed. His internal patterns had.

All of this became fruitful ground for my own health journey.

Kushal’s work with a geneticist ironically led to my own diagnosis: a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. My body can’t produce collagen properly, which is a problem for two reasons. First, collagen is what your ligaments, tendons, skin, and blood vessels are made of. Second, collagen helps regulate and transport the chemical signals between body and brain: things like blood pressure, blood sugar, cortisol, and other automatic functions most bodies manage without conscious effort.

About a year ago, I experienced what happens when that signaling system breaks down.

My symptoms were immobilizing. Severe headaches. Brain fog so intense I sometimes forgot my own name. Fatigue was so overwhelming that I couldn’t walk to the mailbox without exhaustion. I couldn’t stand long enough to make dinner without becoming lightheaded to the point of nearly passing out. At night, my legs cramped in excruciating pain that made sleep impossible.

And through all of it, I was a solo mom, grieving, running a household and a company entirely on my own.

The crisis in my body also triggered my egoic mind. I didn’t have time to be sick. There were bills to pay, soccer games to get to, and a whole company to run. What value did I have if I couldn’t produce, help, manage, or achieve anything? It felt like my mind and body had conspired to sabotage my life.

So I paused. And I turned to the only part left: the soul.

It was there I found peace. In the silence, I was reminded that yes, life is full of pain and struggle, but that’s how we learn. The deepest ground of our being is not achieved, constructed, or earned. There is an abundance so much bigger than me. Which means we don’t navigate this life alone as a singular “I.” That’s just the egoic mind trying to protect itself. There’s a deeper “We” within. I just needed to be present, pay attention, and connect with it.

I spent the next six months doing exactly that, integrating what was happening inside my body, mind, and soul. Doctor appointments and blood draws. Meditation and writing. Urine samples and X-rays. Prayer and silence. Medications and supplements. Books and podcasts.

Eventually, I learned that perimenopause was the trigger. My body was doing what bodies naturally do with age, but its own patterns had been interrupted for so long they didn’t know how to adapt. My adrenal glands were pumping out too much of everything: insulin, aldosterone, cortisol. The only way through wasn’t to restore what was. It was to build something new. That’s where neuroplasticity became the most important tool I had, the brain’s ability to form new patterns when the old ones no longer serve. I calmed my egoic mind and reminded it that change is inevitable. Rather than resist it, I had to understand it.

I rebuilt my diet from the ground up. I discovered that my leg cramps worsened when my brain was over capacity or stressed. I started literally talking to my adrenal glands, telling them I didn’t need the extra hormones, that I was physically safe. Through neuroplasticity, my patterns began to change.

Not because I forced them. Because I learned to see them.

Healing my body taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.

The external world never stopped changing while I was healing. Our roof leaked. The fridge broke. A copper pipe in the air conditioner burst. The thermostat stopped. The hot water heater exploded. The garage door snapped a spring. The dog tore her ACL in both knees. Life kept arriving, indifferent to my capacity.

But I had learned something by then. The only thing I could control was my internal state and how I responded to whatever was happening around me. Every day, I reminded myself that stress was a story crafted by my egoic mind. I could choose what impacted my well-being. I learned to let the narrative go.

That was easier with material objects than with people.

I’m on the leadership teams of two organizations that have been in deep crisis. In both cases, the pattern is the same. New leaders bring fresh ideas and new ways of doing things. The existing members experience those changes as a threat to their belonging. People begin defending and protecting their perspective. The loop persists, and eventually, you have a profound conflict.

There is a fine line between caring deeply about something or someone and becoming attached to it as part of your identity. When we cross that line, the ugliest parts of the egoic mind emerge. We stop treating each other, or ourselves, with dignity. We use people like pawns. We lose our humanity.

It was here, watching people I care about struggle with change, that I recognized my own becoming most clearly. Grief, illness, neuroplasticity, solo parenting, organizational conflict. Everything I had lived through was pointing at the same thing: the suffering we experience is the egoic mind defending something that was never real. It believes it is a singular, isolated thing that must protect itself from change. But the “We within” tells a different story. We are already connected to something larger. The “I” was always the illusion.

The last four years could have destroyed me. Instead, they taught me the most important thing I know.

Change is part of life. The quality of that life depends entirely on how we adapt to it.

When we navigate from an “I” perspective, we let change control us. The limited patterns of the egoic mind react unconsciously. Everything feels personal because the truth is confined to the single perspective of our own self-protection.

But when we tap into the “we within,” everything shifts. We remember that the isolated “I” is an illusion, and that abundance is on our side. From here, we can see the patterns, acknowledge reality, and flow with change rather than exhaust ourselves trying to control what was never ours to begin with.

Our world desperately needs more We. The challenges in front of us are not individual problems with individual solutions: climate change, global pandemics, economic inequality, and rapid technological disruption. They are deeply interconnected, unfolding across systems, shaping one another in real time. They require us to function as a collective “We.” And yet, here we are.

I know this framework works, because it’s how I survived the last four years. It’s how I wake up each morning with renewed compassion, gratitude, and awe, no matter what life throws at us.

So I wrote it down. Not as someone who has figured it all out, but as someone who has been paying close attention. A roadmap for how to follow your knowing, starting from the inside out.

That’s what Becoming We is.

I hope it’s useful to others. At scale, maybe it can do something more. Maybe it can help us find a new way of being together.

Maybe it can lead us toward Becoming We.

Leave a comment

Share

Susan Barbeau is the founder of Follow the Knowing and creator of the Becoming We Framework. She writes every week without fail from Olympia, Washington.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs it. If you’re ready to go deeper, visit followtheknowing.com/becoming-we

Subscribe now