Data Collectors,
Wow, we made it through another year. The feeling Dec 31st gives (at the time of writing this) while simultaneously providing the same level of confusion because time is a construct anyways, yeah? It places time in perspective, that regardless something is moving, people are changing, getting older passing on. There is no escaping that reality for some of us. Every year I hear the same thing “ I can’t believe how fast this year flew by.” Is it that we can’t believe it, or that we have been go, go, going so much we don’t have the time to pause and take it all in?
I’m not a political person.
I’m a pattern-noticer though and lately, this pattern I am noticing is impossible to ignore. Everywhere I look, people are waking up with the same quiet sense of unease—like something is off, but no one can quite name it. The noise is loud. The outrage cycles fast. The stories change daily. And yet, beneath all of it, the same feeling lingers: Something isn’t adding up. I can feel it— the weight of the collective. I’ve been able to feel this since I was a child. This intensity feels like a curse at times, but a blessing at others. It’s why I believe I was guided to this field, this career, but bloody hell.
As Marty McFly would say…
People are starting to SEE! Or at least I hope so… I pray so…
There are billions in money being fraudulently earned, mysteriously lost. Money we are told we don’t have— just disappears? And when we ask about it we are made to feel we are the problem? Institutions are contradicting themselves. Systems are demanding obedience while modeling hypocrisy and deflecting when we start catching on. Any of this sound familiar to you yet? It’s giving “do as I say, not as I do…”Instead of questioning the structure, we’re encouraged to fight each other.
Left.
Right.
Up.
Down.
Black.
White.
Queer.
Straight.
Man.
Woman.
Labeled. Sorted. Pitted against one another.
This is not accidental. HA! Come on, people! Do you really think this is accidental?!?
🎶📝Homework time: Musical experience.
Before we dive in let me touch up on Double Entendres.
Double entendres: Phrases that carry two meanings at once. They are one of my favorite tools for nervous system awareness. They reveal the split screen we’re all navigating. Take Kid Cudi’s lyric: “Don’t fuck up the feng shui.” Depending on your lens, that’s either a reminder to protect your peace—or a warning to stay silent and not disturb the illusion.
It’s both.
That’s what makes it powerful. That’s what makes it dangerous. Because sometimes what looks like peace… is just control with a celebrity face attached. And sometimes what feels like disruption… is actually your nervous system finally telling the truth. Double entendre moments are where your body speaks louder than your brain. Your job isn’t to choose the “right” interpretation. Your job is to notice which one your body believes and ask why.
For my older gens, bear with ya girl, okay. This may not be your genre but that’s ok. Get your headphones, pull up the lyrics, and listen to the music. (Better yet, I’ll make it easier and place the video in this article for you.) Listen to the song and FEEL what Kid Cudi & André Benjamin are trying to tell you here… This isn’t about what your mind tries to distract you with about the artist, their personal life or what you think you know about it— that’s not the HW. That’s noise. The HW is to listen to the experience of the song while you see the lyrics and allow your body to make the meaning. THAT’S true somatic work, using your sense of hearing and feeling (somatic) the music as the portal into your body’s communication.
Everyone’s body will tell them something different. The point is not to debate that data but to alchemize it like the Fabel Stone Soup. We have some time so let me unpack what I mean here.
This is where I let you all into my brain, and I sure hope you see the method to my madness.
In the original stone soup story:
A hungry traveler convinces a skeptical village to each contribute one small thing (a potato, a carrot, a pinch of salt) to a pot of “stone soup” he’s pretending to cook.
At first, everyone claims they have nothing to give.
But one by one, they bring what little they have and together, they create something nourishing that no one could’ve made alone.
Music as Stone Soup: Everyone Brings Their Story
What I’m asking you all to do with this music activity is to listen to music through the nervous system, not the ego.
One person might hear Kid Cudi and feel grief.
Another might feel a memory of their father.
Someone else might feel free.
That’s the point.
The goal isn’t to debate the data your body gives you.
The goal is to contribute it.
Your nervous system responds— even if it seems small— it is your ingredient. Your contribution to this psychological nervous system flavored stone soup.
When we each bring what we have (our felt experiences, our lyrics, our emotional data), we create collective soup. A shared understanding richer than anything we could cook up alone.
So why does this matter?
I think the correct question to ask is
Why doesn’t this matter.
It matters clinically, and here is why. When we’ve been gaslit, our amygdala becomes hypervigilant:
– Is my story valid?
– Am I being attacked again?
– What if I get misread?
But when we engage in this kind of somatic, reflective music practice outside the arena of debate, we start retraining our nervous system to understand from US, ourselves. Not the noise from the echo chambers. The silent inner voice that has been drowned out by everything else. This voice reminds us:
You are not in danger here.
You don’t need to fight for your story to be true.
We are not deciding whose memory is right.
We’re honoring what each body remembers.
We are not debating. We are building soup.
This is co-regulation through contribution.
This is stone soup for the soul and boy oh boy am I optimistic about humanities ability to wake up. I know, I know. It’s a slow drip… but I feel the collective awakening.
I know I sent you down the long route to start the homework but I must explain my madness to you. I mean we are still getting to know each other. Here is the link to the song. Enjoy … (Come back to me and tell me what messages came to your consciousness after you try this.)
(Kid Cudi – By Design) I have embedded the Spotify link below. I do have lack of trust in technology so we shall see if it works ok.
Okay, Let’s continue.
This is what happens in dysfunctional families and nations when truth becomes too threatening to face. The same way it’s too threatening when our own parents won’t face it. Yes, older gen—this goes for you too!! I hate calling you older gen because it’s not about age here. I speak to the inner children within us all, regardless of how long you have walked this earth. This work is about pattern recognition and understanding it all started somewhere.
The Family System at Scale
In family systems theory, when there is unresolved trauma or unacknowledged harm, the system doesn’t heal, it reorganizes around avoidance.
Someone becomes the scapegoat.
Someone becomes the hero.
Someone becomes the problem.
Someone holds the shame everyone else can’t bear to hold or be bothered with. Those of us I call: shit catchers, those of us that follow the rules, over function to make sure we don’t create issues for anyone. While the avoidant, no self-awareness people get away with half-assery.
**Squirrel moment. You know avoidants, I am talking to you here. I say this with love and a flashlight. Y’all are only able to be avoidant because someone somewhere is catching all the things you avoid. In other words: SOMEONE HAS TO DRIVE THE BLOODY SHIP!!
Many avoidants struggle with overstimulation because the things they were able to avoid and be unaccountable for in childhood now show up with natural consequences as an adult. That can be very overstimulating for a person that has never seen the natural consequences of life simply because their parents didn’t want to be bothered with the cognitive dissonance required to hold and maintain boundaries. EVEN if, as an adult, you were enabled—eventually, what’s in the dark comes to light, and those who have played the role as the shit catchers of your avoidance. They will reach their window of tolerance with you and you will feel it. The real issue here, which is the original wound—gets deflected, then creates the secondary injury. Remember that original issue? Probably not, because it’s by DESIGN to distract you from it…
But that original issue remains untouched.
Now, field trip time… let’s zoom out.
What happens in families happens in cultures.
When a system cannot tolerate accountability, it redirects discomfort downward or outward. It creates distractions. It manufactures conflict. (Stir the pot, Vecna energy)
It teaches people to fight each other so no one looks up. This is not conspiracy.
This IS psychology. And just like the system we live inside of, even when those trained in psychology name this pattern, we are cast as the enemy— gaslighted by the same hands who told us we can trust them. We are watching a collective trauma response play out in real time.
The Illusion of Choice
We are told we are divided by ideology.
By party.
By identity.
By belief.
But what we are actually divided by is fear and the fear is being managed.
When people are overwhelmed, dysregulated, and exhausted, they cling to narratives that give them certainty, even if those narratives harm them, isolate them from those who truly care and are safe, and place them in reenactments that just because they feel comfortable— doesn’t mean they’re safe.
The nervous system seeks safety before truth.
So:
We argue about symbols while systems quietly consolidate power.
We fight online while real decisions are made elsewhere.
We turn on each other because connection feels too dangerous.
It’s the same dynamic you see in families where accountability was never modeled. Children learn to survive by aligning, deflecting, or disappearing.
Can you see yet?
The Collective Freeze
What we’re witnessing isn’t mass ignorance. It’s a collective-level of dissociation. Just like children in emotionally volatile, unstable, or unpredictable homes start to behave in what I call dissociating into distractibility—that’s a survival response, not a brain disease! The brain was rewired into that function mode because of the environment. So, if neurons that fire together wire together and we can accept but then reject the same logic when it suggests you could unlearn or rewire. This contradiction leaves me in a low simmer crash out…
Then the ADHD mob comes for my guy Gabor Maté because he so gently gives the public insight you don’t want to hear… but why???
I know why.
Because what’s the payout?!?
Right now, many get to use their ADHD as the consistent explanation for behavior they never actually change. They just continue to name it and people— they are sick of it. So what do they do? They give up having to deal with it. That giving up, is the reinforcement that makes this behaviors and lack of accountability and informed integration continue and get worse. The more society ignores and turns a blind eye, the more it reinforces mental health diagnoses and trauma being used as explanations only, deflecting from accountability. Even if people deny that’s what they are doing, it’s still being done. So why is there so much denial, gaslighting, avoidance of accountability? I watched so many people during my time back home in California dodge owning the fact that they are inaccurate simply because ego. Many don’t want to feel dumb, embarrassed, guilty, or shame. Those emotions don’t hurt us. They are not a threat to our lives if we have to surrender to them.
The very guilt we run from, we easily hand to others to get them to comply with what we want from them...
We have been dragged, dude. I mean, I get it. But giving up is an independent decision. You can’t make everyone else responsible for putting up with what you tolerate due to lack of believing you are worthy of more and worthy of boundaries. People aren’t daft. They’re overwhelmed.
Overstimulated.
They’re underpaid.
And they are trying to survive.
They are watching others do illegal activities or even sell their soul to get by, and the system reinforces it—the same way MOMS, you watch your sons abuse women, the mother of your grandkids, because you are afraid.
And listen, you aren’t weak.
You were born in a time where women did not get to get away with having the mouths they have today. I say that because I have one. 🤭 Meanwhile, down here in the micro—we shame each other. It’s like the coaching industry.
I can’t hate the player; you gotta hate the game. There are people paying thousands to those with no license, no governing board, nothing. What happens when they mess up with the wrong one? Now what?
Society has revealed degrees don’t mean shit at this point. (Yes, it’s an overgeneralization, but let me be a bit dramatic here, okay? 😩)
Having a license doesn’t mean you’re a good therapist—that’s the nuance.
But when you see a society allow unethical behavior while simultaneously encouraging people to give their years and money to an education system that only traps them in debt and can’t guarantee them a job…Meanwhile, someone with the balls enough to just start from literally nothing but the thought to do it and then makes thousands—while licensed professionals make dust compared to that.
It’s not about coaches.
It’s about what people get away with in a selectively avoidant system.
And when you have a population in survival, it’s easy to get compliance from them. All you need is a spicy sprinkle of FEAR.
Data Collectors:
When stress exceeds our capacity to process it, the brain goes into protection mode:
– Fight
– Flight
– Freeze
– Fawn
As a collective, we are frozen and fragmented.
In that state, it becomes easier to:
Point the finger and Blame neighbors instead of systems
Attack each other instead of asking hard questions
Seek certainty & comfort instead of truth
This is how power maintains itself without ever having to raise its voice or a hand.
(Over here in El Paso, a chancla 🩴😂)
The selective awareness of it all, is plastered all over the algorithm with your “how to make passive income…” talk. So you know how this works. This is how they passively maintain control, simply because we humans refuse to see the power we have innately inside of ourselves by utilizing discernment and critical thinking.
Hunger Games
Divergent
The Matrix
The movies been trying to tell us something… are you paying attention?
But wait a minute…
Are they trying to tell us or show us???
The Real Threat Is Connection
Here’s the part that matters, because it’s why division works.
But first, I am going to take the scenic route to get there—bear with me okay. Just like in a family system where one or both parents are abusive, emotionally neglectful, unavailable, etc. Siblings in these environments typically are not treated the same.
Why is that?
Well, my theory is, because some parents can’t balance both or all of the children at once. So, if they have half on their side and half on the opposing side—to them, it’s balanced. Remember: if this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you are thinking like yourself and not like the people with these neural pathways for roads they choose to take. Okay?
You can’t wear your shoes in another’s experience and then gaslight them. That you can’t see what they express. No. Take your shoes off and put theirs on…
Ahh… you see?
Now walk in them 😉.
If I am a parent who has conflict with one kid and I want to maintain power…
Well, I treat the other child(ren) positively to build an alliance. That alliance is not authentic because it is built purely for control—and for the child(ren), purely to survive and not be on that parent’s radar. Do you see how compliance causes unconscious harm to others when you are in an egocentric loop of survival?
Example: Siblings who were conditioned to not be close due to the family environment they grew up it. The siblings uniting together would make the mom insecure because she would feel they were talking about her. The issue here is. first kids, especially siblings are allowed to be connected and talk about whatever they want. A parent insecure about that dynamic may struggle with egocentricism. but if it becomes so profound hat the parent collapses anytime to children even as adults spend time without the parent present. This is narcissism, I see this a lot in elder women— especially those that belong to rigid cultures that teach sameness and anything else is wrong. That polarity runs through their blood. They then place all of that avoided tangled yarn of emotional grief and hand it to their kids to sort through for them. This is when the older generation causes unintentional harm. It always recenters them. Even their Childs truth, feelings, version of the story gets hijacked and recentered around them. This is narcissism.
It’s not about blaming or shaming here. I name because I am trying to help you see! Our brains are overstimulated. Everyone is ADHD now, not because they are. But because they have been gaslighted, manipulated, dragged… for years by a society they thought had their best interest. A Governement that was suppose to have our best interest.
The same way we feel grief that never get’s a funeral for the moment we realize our parents are not the emotionally safe places that life says we are supposed to have.
Well, who is Life and when did they say that?
Exactly…
Our parents, and their parents, and the parents before that.
Are you kidding?
They couldn’t possibly know.
There was no language for this shit.
There was no awareness, no marches.
Society today? We have ALL of that yet people still scream “no access” from their smart device. You can’t see what you don’t utilize. Many refuse to integrate the very things they can name, but punish everyone else for their lack of integration practice.
Can’t you see…
It’s not even about being traumatized anymore.
We are so enabled as a society!!!
So now, if we are challenged…We feel personally attacked rather than seeing it as love. Let’s be real for a second. In a society of ghosting, because people don’t have the cojones to be an adult and say what it is they need to say respectfully. Having someone in your life give you feedback from intentional effort knowing how scary and uncomfortable that is because of how quick people perceive everything as an attack. But also because it’s the very skill you avoid, that is something that needs to be named.
But also examined.
It highlights how even now, when love is in front of us, we reject it because it doesn’t look or feel the way the algorithm told us it would.
The issue here isn’t what you think love is. The issue here is you let something outside of you tell you what’s good for you. And that goes for my work also.
But discernment understands Sav- Me, Hi! I share this not to harm, but to provide perspective and discernment training. If people across identities began talking to each other, really talking—
Not gossiping
Not debating
Not posturing
Not performing
If they compared notes…
If they named shared patterns…
If they realized they were experiencing the same manipulation through different doors…The spell would break.
Like the demise of the hive mind which is a collective consciousness where individual members don’t operate independently — they’re mentally or behaviorally linked to a central controlling entity (often a queen). Think Vecna.
When the queen dies, the network collapses.
The fight is over…
Now what?
That right there. That is the real fear.
Not disagreement.
Not dissent.
But unity that is rooted purely in awareness and love that is rooted in surrender/felt safety. All while implementing understanding and radical acceptance. None of this is being used to control anyone—but to allow.
To just be.
That’s the difference. That’s the antidote.
A Final Truth
This isn’t about left vs. right, if you haven’t read the room. If it went over your head and you are stuck in the booty-tickled entanglement that Vecna has you in…
That’s okay.
You might not be ready to digest all this yet. I understand, I tend to say a lot Costco style, but take it from someone who works with all ages, across many state borders, many cultural lines. Held many laughs, shed many tears, and held many uncomfortable and challenging conversations of truth, even with generations before me who would be deemed unreasonable. I have sat at the table and been welcomed into the homes and families of many. Trust me when I say this:
It’s not about ideology.
It’s not about who’s “awake” or “asleep.”
It’s about whether we’re brave enough to tolerate the discomfort of seeing the system as it is without needing to make someone else the villain for naming it. Because, once people start seeing clearly, and start asking better questions, we are able to stop fighting. We’re able to pivot and hold multiple truths at once and not “what about me” everything that doesn’t center us or our pain. We can hold multiple truths, multiple angles to events that have affected us all. And you are able to hold those angles with nuanced discernment because you learned: It’s not about having everything in life center you, your ache, your wounds. It’s about remembering our stories are what bridge us together, and togetherness is what humanity needs to survive.
Division can’t be an option. Not anymore, Not in today’s emotional climate. Especially for those of us in America. I am doing what I can to help bridge that gap.
What are you doing to bridge it?
—Sav
I hope you all take a moment of intentional pause this evening as you welcome in the new year.
Want to Go Deeper?
The Expanded Assignment (including a guided journaling page, nervous system check-in, and music decoding map) is available for all paid members inside our private sanctuary.
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Are you ready to start rebuilding our inner feng shui?
Let’s get to work😎
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