The Entanglement of Fear
～ an ode to the kidneys
This is a nice place to be in.
As the land of socials begins to cave in on me and what I value as authentic, I wanted to create a space that tugged a little “ahh” in your system. A place where you can grab a warm drink and sit here. Sit with yourself. Be away from it all. A galaxy away from tapping and screens switching from story to story every millisecond. A microcosm of spacious elements that come in the format of medicinal words. Something that prolongs your attention span. A biosphere of language that expands you, holds you. Hugs you when you enter the door. Whispers to you…. “it’s safe to collapse here. it’s safe to not do anything but receive here.”
This is my greatest wish and intention at the start of this publication. What was once a traditional newsletter is now alchemized into a dwelling. A home where you can take off your shoes and feel the grounding of the floor beneath you. An online villa that you can always come back to when the outside world gets too loud and you feel the call to tap into biological resonance. You are always, always welcomed here.
An intricate human aspect and deeply ingrained code of our species is this conditioning of fear. It’s a winter classic in the form of ancestral survival. I’m amid that unknown-shrugging shoulders- energy of my life at the moment. After 3 years of nomading, my dude and I made the final move to settle into our favorite coastal spot. A place where no shoes are my dearest cultural norm and my version of meditating is going to a dog beach every day. It’s been quiet. Quiet as in the invisible atomic vortexes around me have been silent in my guidance. Not a drop or hint of what’s to come next on my path. We are currently in a sublet for a month as we wait. Wait some more. And my personal favorite human experience, continuing the wait when all I want to do is just be in our home. The next spot that allows us to settle. A month out before turning 29 and all I want to do is oddly enough, settle. Something that 21-year-old me would scoff at. And here we are. I’m in this tucked-away super normy family cul-de-sac by a high school and this is all this version of me wants right now. ～
A couple of weeks ago I felt the conditioned program of fear run through my veins when I was checking Zillow every half second of the day. As a child, I had many unpleasant and often activating experiences with moving, with picking up and embracing the intricacy of uncertainty. Uncertainty and the deep abyss of the ～UNKNOWN ～ have been a replicated theme in this lifetime. It was a soul contract for me to be raised by a single mom and sign the dotted line of experiencing all of the moving (literally) parts of what comes from pain and suffering. To agree upon the terms and conditions for all of the evolvement of past versions of me and all the new versions of me to come. To find fluidity in the art of movement is layered. All of these layers are asking me to peel like a soft tangerine. Delicate, but tangy to the tongue.
This encoded collection of memories in my cells became and still is a gift for me to play with as I’m in this transition period of not grasping onto my next landing pad. It’s a freaking mineral bath. It’s the magnesium that I’m depleted in, creating friction in my sodium/potassium balance. It’s the mud underneath the lotus. It holds my greatest potential and also my weakest pain point. It’s my physical expression of duality. Of facing the fact that I’m just human, that we’re all just human. And that being human means we don’t have it all figured out. That we can hide these parts through perfectionism, external habits, or a filter, but eventually they surface. This is my surfacing. An opening that happens to also be public to you and is heavily embedded into the webbing that is this work of mine. A girl who has carved a path of perfection and blatantly hid any minor detail about anything that derailed from said perfection since the age of 5…is now using her business to do just that. To shed and unveil that tender intimacy of fear out of rejection. To let you in, to let me in. It’s quite touching really.
Fear impacts every single biological program (symptom/pathology) that exists in your body. We are beings of liquid. It is the kidneys that regulate the body’s water balance and filters blood plasma. The significance here is that the collective functioning of the kidney tubules goes so beyond just these little beans- they extend to every single phase of healing that you go through. Whether you are experiencing an emotional conflict in the thyroid or having chronic shoulder pain, it’s all impacted by the fear that is swallowed in the kidneys. It’s the bath of your lineage. It can either deplete you or invigorate you for total liberation. It’s an actual funnel that channels deep distress. It’s conditioning and trans-generational to the core.
The emotional conflict connected to the kidneys is the existential or “refugee” subconscious struggle. It embodies the master element of water. Quite literally referring to a “fish out of water” situation. Water is by far one of our most miraculous teachers (if you haven’t gotten into the consciousness of water, I highly recommend checking out Veda’s work). It’s the cosmic language within our liquified crystals that hold so much of our story. The emotional conflict goes back to losing one’s home (or losing anything for that matter), feeling abandoned or lonely, or taking on the perception of no longer having resources. This ultimate emotional charge emanates from the root of defenseless energy.
We all came from water. We developed and nestled in a womb that is a reflection of the sea’s salinity. We were programmed with fear the minute we were birthed into this existence. Whether we had a crunchy holistic home birth or a medically traumatized hospital delivery, we all came into the material plane through the bubble of fear. We were imprinted with the uncertainty of leaving the original home, the ocean of our mothers.
In development, the kidneys evolved as one single organ and then later divided into two. The collecting tubules in essence are the oldest tissue of the kidneys and found their origin in life underneath the waters- this life force migrated out of the water and onto land thus creating a threat to our experience. An evolutionary shock if you will. This is why many women hold onto weight through water retention when they have come into contact with moments that make them feel rejected, unwanted, fearful of life, or uprooted in some sort of fashion. Or why a huge percentage of children who were put in daycare at a young age are more likely to be overweight as adults.
When we withhold water from fear, abandonment, loneliness, etc. while also experiencing different or many different emotional conflicts, the kidneys amplify the excess fluid stored in the organ that’s affected by the correlating brain relay. Every biological program (symptom) is connected to a center in the brain that controls the cells in a particular organ or tissue. An emotionally charged conflict happens on a trifecta level…psyche (perception)-brain-organ. The kidneys are the only part of our bodily system that acts as a double biological program when its emotional experiences are attached to other conflicts.
The healing phase is all about the water baby; therefore an abundance of pee comes with you resolving the emotional experiences that live in your cells. The emotions charged by the kidneys impact every single healing phase to a certain degree depending on how much fear, rejection, or abandonment is present. This can look like increased pain, large growths in the healing phase, more swelling, and overall more dramatic “symptoms” in the resolution phase. It’s honestly so ironic to me that the health & wellness space feeds off your fear which in turn makes you more susceptible to a severe and complex healing phase. Just ponder that for a moment.
The kidneys are the carriers of the deepest fear around your health. We are inundated with sources telling you tomatoes are dangerous and if you don’t put a cover on your smart meter your fascia is going to contract to leave you lifeless.
Mindfulness is a virtue, but extremity is a vice.
There is no power in the era of health we are currently consuming.
The idea of body autonomy is thrown out the window when we are activating each other’s kidneys out of our own unprocessed abandonment. We subconsciously prey on others’ fear so we don’t have to embrace our own.
So we don’t have to take actual radical responsibility for how we perceive and carry our own shit. It’s an unwinding that takes place in all of us- no one is immune to this experience, myself included.
A new paradigm of well-being won’t involve podcasts and reels telling you what you are doing right or doing wrong. It will be you falling in love with every inch of dysfunction that there ever was. It will be you trusting your body the moment something glitches in your field. It will be you making a connection with the kidneys when fear activates you for a moment because it always will.
We’re human, remember.
But what we are not is fear food for an outdated space that is allopathic, functional, holistic, or whatever it is.
It is us that defines what well-being is in an industry that so desperately asks you to stay in fear. To stay in victimhood. It’s the last grip on you into becoming a version that can’t be touched by even the most advanced bio-hack.
Imagine that.
May this be a soft remembrance of why you are even reading this. How you even oscillated into my inner world. May you flood your internal rivers with emotional minerals that spark a charge in you like no other.
Some reflections I’ll leave you with today as you sail through the sea of kidney tubules //
～ what was going on in my life before the symptoms arose in my kidneys?
～ do I have imprints of rejection, being unwanted, feeling excluded, not understood, or being isolated?
～ are my kidneys asking me to heal a loss or a collection of losses in my lifetime (this could be a job, home, family, relationship, etc.)?
～ what is my relationship like to fear? especially with my body and health in general?
～ what is my initial response when I believe something is “wrong” with me or when I’ve been given a pathological label?
～ where have you felt uprooted in your life? thrown out?
～ what have you unconsciously taken on from the generations before you? what was your upbringing like around these emotional experiences?
～ am I willing to hold my connection to fear and abandonment in a totally new manner?
～ what are my kidneys teaching me? how can I calmly ride their waves when these emotional experiences land in my human vessel?
take tender care to the miracle that is you
～ sierra
This is so so so good. Thank you for being in this space... and creating this restful dwelling. As someone who has been on the GNM journey this year... kidneys, water retention, swelling etc has been a feature, so this has been particularly helpful and your questions at the end and all questions I am in the process of asking. It's affirming... What I appreciate about your approach is your side-stepping of commercial industrialisation of health & wellness as it stands currently, (this speaks to my longing for a radically different approach to healing that doesn't yet exist, yet is coming into being through our longing) your souful languaging of what it means, looks like, feels like to be travelling this human existence and my sense of how you honour your own life without compromise. Gratitude.
I’ve read this three times now, and picked up something different each time. I can’t thank you enough for how timely this is for me personally in my journey-
It’s fun how that stuff works out sometimes, isn’t it?
Anyway, I do appreciate you and your work, so so much.