Yesterday I had lunch with a brilliant and successful man whose work I greatly admire. We were talking about re-patterning and breaking out of our limiting mindsets and trauma imprints, and the topic of romantic relationships came up. “Yeah but Arden, can you really change the kind of person you’re attracted to?” he asked me. “Those imprints run so deep, and other kinds of people just don’t feel inspiring. You can’t help who you’re attracted to, can you?” YES. YES YOU CAN. Now, before I tell you how, did you…
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Love At First Sight
t’s often been said that if you feel an immediate, urgent attraction or connection to someone, that that’s a sign you should run – that it is inevitably your shared wounding communicating to each other. This is only true if you’re still in your wounding. We tend to recognize our soul connections very immediately. They’re the people we feel inexplicably drawn to (or, conversely, dramatically repelled by). We may deny our feelings, or we may be unaware of what they are, but our bodies know. If we’re still in our…
Read MoreShifting Trauma With The Mind
I’m seeing a lot going around the coaching world lately about how mind-based work isn’t enough to shift the imprints left by trauma. Anyone who is telling you this is deeply uninformed. This line of thinking completely bypasses entire modalities such as belief hacking, hypnotherapy, Timeline Therapy™, mindfulness, and meditation, among many others. I’ve even heard a coach say that “no thinking is necessary” – really? No thinking is necessary for conscious awareness? I’m a huge fan of bodywork and energy work and I have absolutely utilized them in my…
Read MoreReleasing Attachment To Outcome
The theme of entitlement and attachment to outcome has come up at least 4-6 times over the last two weeks, so ok universe, let’s address that. When I was a people-pleaser, it was more difficult for me to notice when people wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do, because I wasn’t able to set boundaries for myself. In close relationship, I simply did those things. And with people whom I wasn’t in relationship with and with whom I didn’t desire more intimacy, I simply ran. Now that…
Read MoreDo You Have To Feel Triggered To Heal?
Hey everyone. There’s been a theme coming up lately in some circles about whether it’s necessary for us to be “triggered” to release our trauma – whether it’s both necessary and appropriate for facilitators to cross our clearly stated boundaries, scream in our faces, or break us down in front of the entire room in order to somehow break state and shake loose our trauma narratives. I’m here to tell you that NO, THIS IS NOT NECESSARY. And it’s only appropriate if you asked for it in advance. Most of…
Read MoreThe Holy Anger Of The Feminine
Has anyone else noticed lately that there are all kinds of opportunities coming up for us to form a healthier relationship with our anger? Especially if you’re a femme-identifying person, or perhaps you’re not, but you’re feeling anger that seems to emanate from your feminine side. This purge began for me a couple weeks ago, after a steady buildup, and now within the last 24 hours I’ve seen the theme come up in three separate instances as well. So, message received. As women we are very often socialized to internalize…
Read MoreHonoring Your Body’s Yes And No
So you guys know how all this stuff around trauma and touch and sexuality and desensitization came up for me in the last two weeks or so and I’ve been processing it all here publicly like I typically do? Right. I forgot that about a month ago I cast a spell for something like “I create nurturing and nourishing love relationships with ease, joy, and bliss.” I was teaching a private magick practicum as trade for services and I felt like I should also participate in the sigil/candle creation and…
Read MoreTrauma And Leadership
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m both a powerful leader and also a person who realized and purged a metric fuckton of trauma in a relatively very short time and is still going through phases of separating herself from it in order to perceive the distance that will allow for more sovereignty and possibility. That is to say, the more I do this work, the more space I allow from the past, the more clarity I’m able to create and the more powerfully I’m able to show up.…
Read MoreRemoving Your Excuses
Removing your excuses is an ongoing process. Reclaiming your energy is not something you do in one sitting. The more cords to extraneous influences you cut (read: the more you stop wasting time worrying about things that don’t matter or stop putting effort into things that aren’t serving you out of old unconscious programming), the more space you create. The more space you create, the more bandwidth you have to create what you want. But you can’t do this all at once the same way that you can’t move your…
Read MoreExiting The Void
I’m going through some complicated understandings of the relationship between my sexuality and trauma recently. [CN: trauma, abuse, assault, mind control] It took me a long time into adulthood before I realized that BDSM had been, for me, a way of normalizing abuse. That sounds dark, and it was, but remember that anything that makes us feel less alone in the dark is serving a purpose. I unpacked some of this two years ago when I really started a quantum surrender on this journey (by quantum surrender I mean that…
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