Blooming Where You’re Planted 5/22/26

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea that staying is actually a skill. And I don’t mean staying in situations that are violent or abusive or where your nervous system is constantly overwhelmed beyond your capacity. Safety matters, discernment matters, and leaving can absolutely be the right thing sometimes. But I do feel like we’re moving into a time collectively where we’re going to have to learn how to stay with everyday discomforts a little more than we have been. There’s so much uncertainty in the world, so much instability, so much collective frustration. You can feel it everywhere. I was listening recently to conversations around AI and these huge technological shifts happening so rapidly, and hearing about students at graduations literally booing executives off stages because they’re scared, angry, and distrustful about the future they’re inheriting. What keeps coming up for me over and over lately is this question of how we stay present in the middle of discomfort or overwhelm.

I’ve been thinking a lot about long-term relationships. If you talk to people who’ve been together for decades, most of them will tell you the same thing: it’s not easy. There are seasons. There are moments where you feel deeply connected and moments where you don’t. There are misunderstandings, frustrations, projections, exhaustion, and old wounds coming up. And honestly, if I compare who I am now to who I might have become had I left my marriage when things got difficult, I know I would have stayed smaller in some ways. Because staying stretched me and forced me to examine myself. It made me to look at how I relate to discomfort, how I react to negative emotions, and how quickly I want to run when things stop feeling ideal. What I’ve learned is that negative emotions are always going to arise no matter how much healing work you do. That’s just reality. The question becomes: how are you relating to what’s coming up? Because for me, everything eventually came back to it wasn’t the emotion, and it wasn’t the relationship itself, it was my relationship to the emotions. It was the way I framed it and the story I built up around the feelings.

I’m kind of obsessed with health and wellness, I know that about myself. My brain naturally moves in that direction, and I’m always exploring how these ideas apply in real life. Over time, through yoga, meditation, breath work, nervous system regulation practices, gratitude work, and honestly just years of observing myself, I started noticing that I could shift the way I related to my internal state. When I indulged too long in depleting emotions, I reinforced those states. At the HeartMath Institute, they call them “depleting emotions,” and that framework helped me a lot, though I personally wanted to take it deeper spiritually than they tend to. They have incredible research around coherence, the heart and brain, and nervous system regulation. They teach practical tools like breathing in for five seconds through the nose and breathing out for five seconds while focusing on the heart and cultivating gratitude. It works! Within a minute or two, you can genuinely begin recalibrating your nervous system. But for me, I also wanted to understand why emotions were arising in the first place. I wanted to look at the spiritual wisdom inside them, not just regulate them away. What I found over time is that healing wasn’t about becoming permanently positive. It wasn’t about never having hard days again. It was about shortening the amount of time I stayed trapped in those heavier states. What once took months started taking weeks to shift. Then days, or sometimes even hours. I still slip sometimes. I still have difficult feelings that I trudge through tirelessly at times. But I don’t stay there the same way anymore because I’ve built muscles around how I relate to those emotions.

And this is where the idea of blooming where you’re planted started making sense for me too. For years, I struggled living in Alaska. The cold, the darkness, the isolation…it felt unbearable at times. I would reinforce those thoughts constantly: I hate it here. I can’t do this. This place is awful. And all I did was perpetuate more suffering inside myself because my attention kept feeding the same emotional loop. Eventually, I realized that while I still had my preferences, I had to reframe my relationship to where I was. Something kept bringing me back here, to Alaska, so instead of constantly fighting reality, I started practicing gratitude for what the experience was teaching me. This profoundly changed my internal chemistry. It changed my nervous system. It changed my relationship to my life. And then I started to apply it to my work, friendships, family—really anything meaningful. We live in a culture that often tells us that discomfort means something is wrong, that we should set more boundaries, leave, optimize, upgrade, move on. But some of the richest things in life only emerge through sustained relationship over time. Depth and trust take time. Intimacy takes time. And sometimes what we’re actually running from isn’t the situation itself, but our inability to stay present with what the situation awakens in us.

I’m not saying everyone should stay in every situation. Again, discernment really matters. But I do think there’s value in asking deeper questions before immediately escaping heavy emotions or discomfort. Sometimes the next layer of growth, connection, love, creativity, or understanding is sitting right on the other side of the moment where we would usually leave. Sometimes staying long enough to work through the microclimate of a difficult moment allows us to reconnect to something much larger than the moment itself. For me, all of these practices: breath work, yoga, gratitude, meditation, nature, grounding, movement, and nervous system regulation have helped me build the capacity to stay present long enough to access that deeper connection. And honestly, some of the most satisfying parts of my life have come from that willingness to remain present through the ebb and flow. Because perfection isn’t real. Some days you show up fully. Other days, you don’t want to show up at all. Some days you feel deeply connected. Other days, you feel disconnected and exhausted. That’s real, and learning how to stay present inside that reality has probably been one of the most important forms of healing I’ve ever experienced.