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In October 2024, I went through a romantic breakup.

You may know this kind of break-up.

Not just losing a relationship, but losing the future you had quietly built in your mind. The trips you imagined. The mornings. The rituals. The lovemaking. The meals cooked. Basically, the shared life that never quite got to happen. The future I had quietly built in my mind disappeared overnight.

When that disappears, something inside you collapses.

In the past, when I went through breakups like that, I didn’t know how to stay present with the pain. I escaped it. I smoked cigarettes. I drank vodka. I pushed everything down and kept moving. I numbed it. I stayed functional and disconnected. That was how I survived.

You might’ve had your own version of that.

This time, I knew I couldn’t do it that way again. I was older, and I was wiser. This time, I was gonna play it differently.

So I started walking up the hill behind my house at sunrise.

Every morning, I stood facing the light and prayed. The prayers were on-purpose and personal. Full of gratitude. Full of questions. But at their core, they were simple.

Help me come back to myself.

Help me not abandon myself in this.

Help me remember who I am.

That same time, on the advice of trusted counsel, I began writing morning pages.

Each morning, before ANYTHING else, I wrote. Whatever was there.

Grief. Anger. Longing. Confusion. Random thoughts. Nothing at all.

Sometimes I literally wrote, “I am supposed to write without stopping, so I am writing without stopping.”

I did this for months.

And then one morning, on the hill, something opened.

I began receiving what felt like a curriculum.

All the teachings I had received. All the lineages I carried. All the years of study and practice. All the ceremonies. All the classrooms. All the sessions with clients.

It started arranging itself.

The wisdom of the jungle. The teachings of the mountains. The travels through South America. NLP. IFS. Supervision. Retreats. Medicine work. Thousands of hours sitting with people in courage and vulnerability.

It was all organizing itself into modules and sections.

I had my phone out and was recording everything. Teachers—living and passed—appeared. Client stories surfaced. Patterns became clear. Frameworks formed.

At some point, I paused and thought:

This “class” needs a textbook.

So on a dime I took everything and formed it all into a Table of Contents. Chapters, sections, headings.

I stayed on that hill an extra hour that morning. My phone barely had enough battery. When I finally walked home, the intention for Healing the Modern Soul was alive.

A month later, I went alone to a small house in Aptos overlooking the ocean. It had been gifted to me by a client as thanks for our work together. My partner and I were supposed to go together. Instead, I went alone.

I was grieving. Contracted. Tender.

I used those four days as a writer’s retreat.

I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

By then, the book was already well underway. It was the first of many more writers retreats.

I was writing what I thought would be a resource entirely for my clients.

But it kept growing.

It became a book for therapists and guides. A way to extend the work beyond the session. A way to support integration between meetings. A way to give language and practices people could return to again and again. So that we weren’t starting over each time with them. We were building.

It became a way to help people stay connected to themselves between sessions. To integrate experiences. To regulate their nervous systems. To make meaning of change. To walk their own healing paths with more support.

Eventually, I saw that it wasn’t just my story anymore.

It was a companion for anyone who has lost something. Anyone who has felt untethered. Anyone who wants to heal without hardening. Anyone who wants to grow without abandoning themselves.

It was clear that it was for the healing of humanity.

About a year later Healing the Modern Soul was born from that time.

From heartbreak. From prayer. From showing up. From choosing presence over numbing. From learning how to come home to myself.

If you’re in a time like that now, I see you.

And I wrote this for you.

So you can come back to yourself—again and again. And keep choosing yourself, even in the hard times.

First published in Facebook on Feb 22, 2026