Reflections on stillness, rest and how art helps us stay grounded in a changing world.

These days, clarity doesn’t arrive for me in facts or headlines. It arrives in silence, in rest, in those moments when the world forgets how to perform and remembers how to feel. As the equinox tilts us toward a new cycle of the year — the birth of spring and the newness it brings with us in the northern hemisphere —I find myself listening more closely to the spaces between the ending we just came from and the beginning we’ve stepped into, between the illusion of certainty and the reality of the unknown.

I’m still in New York, relishing the beauty of this time. Friends are asking how I’m managing my time away from Portugal and my extended stay in the U.S. and I can say this: being in the heart of the country right now—at the center of so much noise and transformation—has been strangely grounding. The unrest is everywhere, national and global, and I feel it viscerally, like I’m wading through a lake muddied after a storm. My body may be sifting through the weight of what’s happening all around. me, but my mind is beginning to settle like sediment after rainfall. In that quieting, I trust that clarity will not only return—but arrive in a purer form.

That said, I’m not waiting on the world to deliver that clarity. I’ve been practicing states of deep yet awakened rest—active awareness and inner resourcing—that allow me to recalibrate in uncertainty. Through this process I’m learning to trust myself when external cues dissolve. This moment feels like an invitation—not to push forward blindly, but to soften into the mystery. To attune to what is moving by, between, and beneath the noise.

The Dynamic Stillness

Stillness has been my anchor. Not as inactivity, but as an animate intelligence. Stillness isn’t about doing nothing—it’s about finding the space inside where movement meets presence. In a recent integration session one of my clients shared that they couldn’t tell if they were surrendering or just stuck. That resonates with me, too. So often, we mistake stillness for stagnation. But the stillness I’m exploring is deep receptivity. It is attunement. It is allowing transformation to shape us in its own time, rather than trying to control or contain its rhythm.

I felt this more clearly during a ski weekend in Utah with old friends. Each of us women arrived carrying something—global chaos, physical pain, personal grief, the ache of not knowing. And yet, instead of turning away, we gathered. We sang. We sat in circle with music and tears, allowing the weight we carried to move through us. There was no clarity offered, no tidy resolution. Just presence. That, I think, is the kind of stillness I’m learning to honor. One that breathes, that witnesses, that doesn’t need to solve.

This work of integration—especially in the context of navigating altered states of consciousness—is not about arriving at answers. It’s about holding space for what arises, even when it’s undefined.

So I ask myself—and those I guide—how do we become people who can live in relationship with impermanence? Who are not undone by it, but reshaped? Often, our suffering doesn’t come from the change itself, but from our resistance to letting it shape us. From trying to make meaning too quickly, instead of letting meaning emerge slowly in it’s own perfect time.

“Singing to the Beloved”

I’ve been holding onto a quote I heard recently on an episode from The Emerald podcast: “Singing to the Beloved in times of crisis means remembering the sacred in a world determined to pull us farther from it.”

I love how Joshua Michael Schrei invites us to return to the “Beloved.” What he gestures toward is this: that singing to the Beloved is not an escape from reality, but a tender act of remaining with it—even when it’s confusing, contradictory, or full of ache. It’s a kind of devotion, not to an outcome, but to a way of being. In a culture obsessed with critique, where highlighting what’s broken becomes a social currency, I find myself drawn to a deeper current. The sacred doesn’t seek attention. It moves quietly—through the arts: image, sound, movement.

Art as a Portal

New York City continues to be one of my greatest teachers of this. Whether it’s a jazz set at Dizzy’s in Lincoln Center, a 4 hour long Kirtan, the pop-up sculpture gallery in Chinatown, or the quiet awe of standing before masterworks in a Fifth Avenue museum —the arts open something essential in me. I’ve been moved by burlesque in the Lower East Side, by Broadway musicals, by the Operas at the Met, by the Saturday Buddhist transmissions at Tibet House. Each of these encounters awakens something ancient and initiatory. I grow clearer, more nimble, more attuned each time I let myself be fully immersed in these forms.

On a gallery walk with my friend Alia, she said: Art and poetry force us to consume history. We like to believe our moment is unique, but art reflects the patterns of what has come before.

The other night I saw the Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck with George Clooney. In the final scene, he steps beyond the role of Edward R. Murrow and speaks directly to the audience. The monologue is a reflection on the power of media to both inform and distract, and it’s followed by a rapid-fire montage of the last 70 years of broadcast footage: moon landings, civil rights protests, global tragedies and televised spectacle. It ends with a jarring image of Elon Musk giving his infamous inauguration-day salute, and we are left with the eerie recognition: This is where we are now.

The message is clear: headlines aren’t just loud. Sometimes they’re slick, seductive, sometimes well-intentioned. Yet truth-telling costs something. And accountability isn’t just for those in power—it’s for the audience, too.

Returning to the Well

When I feel overwhelmed, I return to what steadies me: sacred texts, poetry, and the voices of those who remind me how to feel. Rumi. Tsangyang Gyatso. Audre Lorde. David Whyte. The Bhagavad Gita. I walk the streets of New York City speaking poems aloud and transcribing them into my phone so they don’t slip away.

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic writes that ideas are living entities. They choose us. If we say yes, they stay. If not, they move on. Lately, I’ve been practicing saying yes more often—even when I’m unsure. Creativity doesn’t require certainty. It asks for presence.

Maybe this is how we begin to befriend uncertainty. Not by solving it, but by letting it choose us and shape us into better listeners. By tracing its echoes in stillness. We are not the first to feel unmoored. And we won’t be the last.

Descending Inward

Yoga Nidra Training at Menla Retreat Center

I’m currently taking a 100 hour Yoga Nidra teacher training with Michele Loew, where we’re exploring the koshas—the five subtle layers of being. In Yoga Nidra, we journey inward through these sheaths: from the physical body (annamaya kosha), to the breath and energy (pranamaya), the mental-emotional realm (manomaya), the discernment body (vijnanamaya), and finally to the innermost layer—the bliss body, or anandamaya kosha. This is where identity falls away, and what remains is simply presence.

Kamini Desai describes this layer in Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep as: “A space of deep peace where we are no longer grasping, resisting, or performing. The mind dissolves into rest, and we touch a part of ourselves untouched by time, pain, or thought.”

After several days of deep practice during our immersion at Menla in the Catskills I encountered this state not as a concept but as a lived experience. And in that space, I wasn’t striving. I wasn’t naming. I was simply there—resting in what already is.

This space nourishes the nervous system. It dissolves old narratives and the architecture of physical tension. It remembers us back into wholeness. It restores trust.

Reflections for the In-Between

“What if rest is not a reward, but a sacred return to who I truly am?”

“What part of me is already whole, even in the midst of uncertainty?”

These are the questions I’m holding—and offering to those I support in their own journeys of integration. Whether emerging from expanded states, career and life transitions, or quiet initiations of grief, there’s a sacred invitation to root deeper, not wider.

I’m learning how to notice the sacred in unexpected places—in subways and saunas, in wakeful morning runs and in the deep contours of sleep and dream. Integration isn’t a clean line from before to after. It’s a spiral. A dance. An extraordinary practice of listening to what wants to emerge.

Stillness is not absence: it is awareness. A way of being with what is. And that, I think, is what we’re all learning to do. To be with it. To be with ourselves. To stay.

This is the art of unearthing the sacred—not by rising above uncertainty, but by walking with it.

Unearthing the Sacred in Times of Uncertainty