Why I've not been writing

a shift in my purpose, nervous system regulation & navigating the pressure of online authenticity

When I started my Substack in January 2025, I thought this would be my new thing.

I’ve never had trouble being creative. For years I’ve been expressing on social media, through video and images, courses and even through sessions. Then, inspired by this platform full of thoughtful, deep writers, I rediscovered my passion for long-form writing - my first love. (Echoing a sentiment of one of my favorite spiritual leaders Laura Matsue Guenther who recently started her own Substack.)

So I thought: here we go!

But life had other plans for me.

Every time I wrote something here, I felt the urge to not share it.

So I didn’t.

After that, I kept writing draft after draft. I think I have a total of 26 posts lined up now, on all kinds of subjects, more personal ones - integrating what I needed to integrate - and commentary pieces about the relationship between social media algorithms and the image of the ‘glamorous online spiritual guru’, channeling your own information versus relying on AI, how manifestation for the chronically tired is different and an energy update about 2025.

Writing these drafts has been incredibly healing for me. I was unwinding through language. I wrote and wrote and wrote - thorough, well-researched pieces.

And I kept them all to myself.

After years of squeezing out every last drop of life force energy into my online endeavours, letting the creations (sub)stack up and not releasing them was a luxury.

I guess I had that coming.

The pendulum swung

For years, I had been pushing myself to share on fast-paced social media platforms for my business. I was always chasing the edge of barely making enough money.

Then, I healed this wound. And my creative spirit rebelled. The pendulum swung to the opposite end. Instead of oversharing and depleting myself, I was now guided to share nothing at all, no matter the (financial) consequences.

This wasn’t the biggest reason I stopped sharing online though. What was happening on a deeper level, was a shift in my purpose.

Goodbye to many of my new age practices

Before, when I referred to my ‘purpose’, I meant my online ‘lightwork’ (quotation marks because I never took this that seriously, actually, which I will get to in a bit): sharing my channeled insights and spreading soothing energy. I loved doing that.

But my ‘purpose’ was undergoing a huge transformation.

It started when I restored regulation to my nervous system.

Funny, how such a small sentence summarizes a world-shaking, mind-blowing, ego-shattering experience that lasted for months.

Since my brain has been literally rewired, it has been deleting all kinds of habits and behaviors.

Many of the lifestyle choices I had as a ‘spiritual person’ were now obsolete.

I shedded (hi wood snake year) almost all of the spiritual habits I had built the 7 years previously. These were the new age practices that I taught, expressed and praised in my courses, sessions and online content.

They had served me.

And now they were gone.

No residue left.

To top that off, near the end of 2024 I also took a marketing course that was all about using your authentic voice. We learned to recognize the various ways our survival physiology (fight, flight, freeze and fawn) showed up in our marketing - very fitting with the process I was already going through. One of the exercises was to delete the content that wasn’t in alignment with our authentic voice.

Because of this, I started a process of deleting old YouTube videos, Instagram pages (although my old one was deleted by Instagram itself), website pages, Reading offerings and courses, one by one…

After a few weeks of doing this, I realized that nothing that I offered represented my authentic voice, and everything came from survival.

So I deleted it all.

It was both exciting and nerve-wracking.

And it made sense to me.

Actually, I had chosen this consciously

Due to difficult personal circumstances from 2020 - 2023 (+that whole traumatizing plandemic situation), I didn’t have the capacity to share vulnerably from my deepest values as I had done before on my Instagram account - maybe some of you will remember how I shared deeply on attachment styles and shadow work there.

Instead, I started my YouTube where I focused on fun new age subjects, finding embodied ways of practicing 5D consciousness, light language or starseed remembrance for example, and offering services for these types of more etheric, esoteric subjects. I believe that you can use new age to escape or you can use it to come closer to yourself - I was always striving for the latter. So no regrets. Starseed remembrance for example is a great way to integrate the feeling of ‘being an alien’, if you use it in an embodied way. At least, that’s how I taught it.

In this difficult time, new age was my favorite resource, my favorite comfort. I’ve gotten flack for this. As if needing comfort or resources as a sensitive was somehow wrong.

But it is this exact emotional repression that is at the root of so much of our collective problems, stemming from an unattuned upbringing where valid needs were neglected or shamed, and softness deeply suppressed.

If you’ve been following me for a longer time, you know it was my intention to show what embraced sensitivity and softness look like.

My core mission with Mayasana, my new age business, was to offer soothing through channeled insights and validation of sensitivity, while staying connected to the body.

So while people attacking this idea of ‘resources for sensitive souls’ may have thought they were hitting a sore spot (which would only be a projection of their own trauma), I had actually done so much healing on this particular wound, that I had long since become immune to this kind of judgment.

This was actually the wound that I was helping others heal.

Again and again, I showed up in my expression of sensitivity to give others an example of what that might look like - and that you can exist and be safe while you’re at it.

Had it all been fake?!

Let me backtrack a bit.

So I found out in that marketing course that nothing I did represented my authentic voice. I know how that sounds. Did I lie to you?! Was it all just a scam? Was I, indeed, fake?

No, actually, this was a pretty radical gut feeling that I had. You know, how sometimes your intuition provides raw material that you then need to unpack?

I wondered about it, because it hadn’t felt ‘inauthentic’ at the time. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered that to me, the words ‘authentic voice’ meant: the things that are aligned with my deepest values.

It wasn’t a big surprise that I didn’t use this ‘authentic voice’ (talking about my deepest values), because I had chosen to focus on a more secondary (you could say: superficial) value of ‘soothing resources for sensitives’ instead, which was valid as well.

So I didn’t focus on my deepest core value in my online work, but on a secondary value, which was genuine as well.

I ended up deleting all my content, but I realized that didn’t mean that it had been inauthentic.

It just didn’t align with my deepest authentic values and now, something had shifted. I had the space to return to that depth again.

“Your spiritual business should be a reflection of your deepest soul”

And that brings me to the topic of authenticity for online spiritual entrepreneurs. On the one hand, there are many fake spiritual entrepreneurs parroting whatever they think is going to sell, and of course 50% of the internet now consists of AI which is a whole new level of parroting, fakeness and the polar opposite of ‘embodied authenticity’.

So hell yes to authenticity, we definitely need it in a world that is increasingly getting more artificial. (I’m working on a piece about AI chatbots vs. channeling, by the way).

On the other hand, I also have some issues with the push to be authentic in the online self-help/spiritual field.

It can get really toxic as well.

I guess it depends on how we use the word ‘authenticity’, which can be something along the lines of ‘just aligned with an inner value however superficial’ or ‘coming from your deepest soul level’ - and everything in between. All of these things are, in my opinion, authentic. Maybe not all as deep, but authentic nonetheless.

I feel that there is a hefty pressure for entrepreneurs to cough up that ultimate deep soul marrow though, topped with the already existing pressure on social media to feed the algorithms - it can be very taxing to remain balanced while you’re gutting yourself to feed a machine.

But here’s the thing. There are lots of people with genuine businesses that don’t share their ‘ultimate soul marrow’, and that is fine - they’re just selling something else, something that’s also needed or wanted by clients, that can be totally genuine.

We don’t have to transmit the heroic culmination of our soul’s work and our deepest most profound soul mission all of the time in order to be valid as spiritual entrepreneurs.

So in my business, I mostly shared resources, for soothing, finding comfort, calming, and validating sensitive needs. Which is completely fine (god knows this chaotic world needs it) and I won’t give an inch to people that proclaim otherwise.

These resources weren’t my ‘ultimate soul’s work’ though, and I chose that for a reason: I needed this in my life in a rough patch, so might as well help others with it too. Even though it wasn’t my deepest value, it was still authentic because it represented other values that I hold. Win-win.

A clear-headed person would just maybe just shrug this off and say ‘aren’t you just evaluating and moving on to things that feel more authentic now, isn’t this just about changing your mind which you’re very much allowed to do?’ Well, thank you, imaginary clear-headed person, you’re quite tolerant, which is definitely needed in this online landscape.

I feel that I need to say this though. First of all, I want to assure you that I didn’t deceive you. Second of all, writing this here is necessary for me to unwind all of this ‘new age entrepreneur’ conditioning - as in, my heart told me that I need to share this in order to keep following my soul’s path. And thirdly, I also want to speak up about a pattern that I’m observing in this spiritual community - and I’m not the only one.

“You’re giving up on your very life’s purpose!”

When I went through my internal shift where I released many of my soothing new age practices (because I no longer needed them as I was more regulated), I felt this weird conditioning that I was ‘abandoning’ something.

Amanda Montell in her book ‘Cultish’ aptly says that in the field of wellness, there is a conditioning that “‘giving up’ on the business would mean giving up on your very life’s purpose.” (Although this part was more about wellness pyramid schemes, and in the rest of the book she’s a bit too negative about the whole new age field for my tastes and definitely has her own opinions on it, anyway, it’s a good book for anyone that is willing to take a step back and look at what makes something cultish.)

But yeah, it’s that serious for a lot of people - the business as soul purpose. This is how we get sold the dream of being a spiritual entrepreneur: we are meant for something bigger, we need to follow our dreams, answer the whispers of our soul! …by starting our own business with the expensive help of that spiritual business coach.

While this can all be definitely genuine, we also need to see through the inherent capitalism in this ‘spiritual business as the dream’.

In my opinion, the (online) new age type of spirituality has become very entrenched with the ego, creating a ‘spiritual ego’ rather than liberating oneself from the identification with ego. Do you see this too?

I like how Eckhart Tolle talks about this. In a podcast episode by ‘A little bit culty’ (can you tell I’ve been doing research on cults), he talks about taking on the ‘function’ of a spiritual teacher while he works, but doesn’t identify with it from his ego, and releases this ‘function’ as soon as the work is done. This, I think, is very healthy and weirdly enough not something that is done a lot.

In fact, I often see spiritual entrepreneurs as being very identified with their work, having no work-life balance at all. But what we do doesn’t define us.

This is an important spiritual lesson.

No matter how authentic our business is, no matter how deeply it represents our soul, it isn’t us. To use Eckhart Tolle terminology, it is just a temporary form that we are creating. This creation may carry our life force, but it’s not who we are.

There is a lot of identification in the spiritual field for example with ‘being a starseed’ - when people use it to escape and don’t even see themselves as human, just as an alien, because they’re in so much pain in their body that they want to escape. It is understandable. It’s why I always chose an angle of validation and soothing whenever I talked about starseeds in the past. I knew I was talking to very dissociated people and I wanted to offer them some safety, to perhaps land in their body a bit more.

Or they identify with ‘lightwork’ to the point that the very idea of taking a break from that is like blasphemy. I once made a YouTube video titled ‘Lightworker, it’s okay to take a break’, talking about the pattern of self-sacrifice - giving from an empty cup -that a lot of empathetic people have, and I got a severely triggered comment from someone saying that I am ‘not a real lightworker’ because a real one would never take breaks. This, too is understandable - if the saviour stops saving everyone, someone in survival mode is suddenly confronted with the need to take care of themselves and if they have insecure attachment/early developmental trauma, this can be very hard.

I was already aware of it while I was doing the new age work the past 7 years. It hugely informed how I presented my information (soft, soothing, validating), and also why I believe it resonated with so many people - my most watched videos had hundreds of comments from people saying they related so much and it helped them heal.

So, knowing this about the spiritual community, I wondered whether people would feel like I abandoned or even betrayed their spiritual attachments, if they had identified with ‘being a starseed’, ‘ascension’, ‘lightwork’ or ‘5D’ (and everything else that I shared), now that I took a step back from it.

It did indeed feel as if performing in this specific spiritual way was supposed to be the very purpose of my very existence that I had ‘signed up for’ by talking about it, my ultimate soul identity, because then I would be ‘sharing my light’ and otherwise I would have gone back to 3D, or something.

Those were the thoughtforms, the conditionings, that I was picking up from the field.

Genuine, down-to-earth marketing

I’ve always found marketing hard.

Offering value with my services: completely fine.

Finding a way to promote it to potential clients? Help.

Even though I didn’t attach to this spiritual identity that hard myself, I had taken all this conditioning on in my language online, as I was figuring this whole ‘marketing thing’ out along the way, going into it perhaps a bit too deeply, and using messaging that wasn’t how I really wanted to market, but just what I saw everyone else doing. There was a lot of trial and error involved. Ways of phrasing things that I tried out, then dropped. To be honest, I was clumsy a lot of the time.

I thought it was harmless. But it is a bit distorted. And I take full responsibility for participating in that. This was all part of my own survival mode in my business and I have compassion for the trauma that drove me to do this, as well as just a general lack of a knack for and education in ‘how to market’.

So when I became aware of the conditioning of ‘but this should be your purpose’, I immediately knew that my sensitivity to this was my own well-familiar people-pleasing pattern, trying to anticipate other people’s negative response.

So I stopped in my tracks.

I realized it wasn’t just an internal thing, my own ‘silly trigger that I needed to work on’, but a reflection of an issue in the broader new age scene.

It felt like I was committing a spiritual faux pas by dropping the new age practices and going silent, because this was how I was conditioned by the messaging in this community.

For a community preaching liberation of the ego and unconditional love, there is a whole lot of performance and identification going around!

I knew I wasn’t abandoning or judging anyone by deleting my content or stopping my work (as you can read throughout this whole essay), so if anyone would feel that way, they would probably just be a bit cultish about their new age attachments and project and deflect onto me.

In my own path, I’ve learned it’s best to not take this whole thing that seriously, it’s supposed to make our lives lighter, not denser.

So then I let my business die.

Mayasana is gone.

Very much like you would reassess and stop any other job that isn’t working for you.

In the end, a spiritual business is ‘just a job’.

I know, blasphemy!

But come on, there is a whole area between ‘being fake and just in it for the money’ and ‘being overly identified with your spiritual business’ that is way more healthy for entrepreneurs to reside in, than in either of these extremes.

It can be ‘just a job’, and genuine.

It can be authentic, yet not an expression of someone’s deepest core values.

And that is okay.

I’m making this case to call out a pattern of ‘spiritual ego’-based marketing in the new age community, because I hope it liberates someone out there.

You can relax.

And I don’t see anything I did as ‘bad’ that I now ‘have to rebel against’. It has all been part of the journey.

I believe there is a different way to market spiritual services that I’m only just discovering.

Before you are like ‘yeah you shouldn’t even ask for money if you want to be of service’ (it baffles me that people still think in this medieval way, we don’t live in monasteries anymore where we’re being provided for by our community okay, unless you’re volunteering?): there is nothing wrong with selling spiritual teachings - in the end, it is just a function, a job.

A spiritual teacher has put a lot of time, energy and effort into learning how to teach these concepts - that’s what you’re paying for.

It’s all a bunch of useful insights and techniques that help us remember who we are, transmitted from the unique soul essence of that person that has unique ‘codes’ to offer. You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want it.

Anyway, I always want to address that conditioning of ‘you shouldn’t ask for money’ where I can, because I still see it pop up now and then.

I am making a big shift in how I want to market. For one, focusing more on long-form content on this Substack platform is part of that.

Finding peace & being in our comfort zone

Back to nervous system regulation.

As I said, I restored regulation back to my nervous system, and this little sentence sounds so simple and unassuming, that it is easy to overlook, but it was a humongous shift for me. It completely shifted the content that I was offering (deleted it all) and the way I wanted to market.

I have released a ton of trauma, or ‘stored survival stress’ in the terminology of the nervous system work that I did.

When we are living in a state of nervous system dysregulation, we feel inherently unsafe. We are always in ‘danger zone’, called ‘panic zone’ in this image.

To push ourselves to grow when we are traumatized like this, just isn’t viable. In order to grow and learn, we have to feel safe, and able to tolerate some level of discomfort. If we always feel unsafe, that doesn’t work.

So in order to grow, we first need to be IN our comfort zone.

Which somehow gets overlooked a lot. We only get messages that we need to get out of it.

So again, there’s nothing wrong with comfort or seeking out soothing resources.

This is how to do it:

When we use these resources while feeling into our body, we can calm down and access more safety within. This accessed safety can then also create space in the system to bring up old traumas. Then, our comfort zone gets bigger and bigger and we spend more time in it, releasing more trauma etc. It’s easier to access the ‘growth’ zone now! With greater levels of internal safety, we now feel stable enough to access deeper and deeper levels of authenticity and express them to the world.

I’m not going to go deeper into all this for the sake of keeping this post on point, but this video describes pretty much the definition of ‘trauma’ that I use, and Gabor Maté has spoken extensively about the relationship between authenticity and trauma.

If we haven’t experienced the shift from living in survival mode to living from inner peace, it can be hard to understand what it means.

We can be completely unaware of being in ‘survival mode’, like I was, and might even think we’ve already found peace or know what it means when we make superficial shifts, endlessly refining our habits and resources.

But turns out, with this pattern we are just managing our dysregulation instead of curing it.

That was the ego death for me, right there.

I know it is confrontational. It definitely was for me.

But I can also assure you that I’m talking about an experience more lasting and profound than any new age practice ever gave me glimpses of.

Still, I’m not here to debate the validity of new age practices. As I said, there is a time and place for everything and a resource is just a resource: it’s all in how we use it.

I’m just describing my own experience and how that created a shift in my values (going for that deeper authenticity again) and what I stand for both on a personal and professional level.

If this isn’t your cup of tea or even offensive in some way, feel free to move along.

There are more ways than one to true, lasting inner peace beyond needing resources to manage your survival state all the time.

This has been mine.

Unwinding & divining: an update

I’ve called my Substack ‘unwinding & divining’ to refer to both nervous system work and spiritual practice, the two things I like to combine now.

I’m still in the vulnerable stages of my transformation process which, chaotic as it might be, doesn’t not need to be fixed and which I need you to respect, so advice or ‘spiritsplaining’ my own experience back to me is definitely unsolicited. If you have well-intentioned comments or questions though, I’ll see if I can answer them. I’d love to (re)connect.

I really value the group of wonderful conscious people that I met online. Some of you have been emailing me lately - thank you. I’ve had many amazing long-term clients and I really value the connection I’ve had with you over the years, whether that was through sessions, Readings or just email. I just kept my break announcement low-key and brief, because I didn’t yet know whether I would return or not.

I intend to publish my drafts (the less personal ones, the pieces that were reflections on broader topics) one by one.

I’m curious if you’ve ever gone through a process like this, especially if you’ve rewired your nervous system and restored regulation, finding this genuine, visceral inner peace and making a big pivot in your life.

If you’re new in case the algorithm hasn’t completely punished me for starting an account in January and then not posting for months: you’re welcome to unwind & divine with me.

Short description: I used to talk a lot about aliens and lightwork, now I’m really into nervous system work, commentary about the spiritual scene (which I will hopefully do without too much sassiness, but no promises) and slow, intentional living offline. If you vibe with that, feel free to stick around and don’t forget to subscribe.