2025 in Review: The Year Trust Became Ground

A journey into a new relationship with reality.

There’s a moment from this year I keep returning to.

I’m sitting before a medicine journey. My body is doing what it often does before something big—heart beating fast, chest tight, breath shallow, a low hum of activation running through my nervous system.

I’m really nervous.

And for most of my life, my relationship to this sensation has been the same: hunker down, brace against it, wait for it to pass.

Somewhere deep in my patterning, I had learned that discomfort was something to survive. That the right response to intensity was to harden, contract, and endure—wait for the nervousness to end, wait for the uncertainty to resolve, wait for life to become more comfortable so I could finally relax.

But sitting there, in that moment before the journey, something different happened.

I saw it.

I saw the pattern clearly—not just intellectually, but in my body. I was bracing. I was waiting. I was enduring. I was treating my own aliveness as a threat.

I even saw how all the ways I knew to ground myself were fundamentally just strategies that pushed away the sensations of nervousness.

And then came the insight that would reshape the rest of my year:

If I keep this relationship with nervousness, I will stop doing the things that matter.

Because here’s the truth I couldn’t escape: the bigger I play, the more I step into the unknown, the more I follow the call of my soul—the more this sensation will be present. Nervousness isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that I’m at my edge. It’s the feeling of growth.

And if my relationship is to ground or to brace and wait for it to pass, then I will subconsciously avoid the very things I’m here to do.

So I tried something different.

I breathed into it. Not to make it go away. Not to transform it into something else. But to actually relax into it—to let the sensation be what it is without pushing any of it away.

And something shifted.

The sensation was still there. But it wasn’t a threat anymore. It was just energy. It was life force moving through me.

I realized, in that moment, that not just nervousness but every sensation I had ever resisted as something to avoid or survive could actually be aliveness. With enough openness and surrender, every sensation could be pleasure. Every sensation could actually be the orgasmic pulse of existence moving through my body.

The only thing that made it suffering was my resistance to it.

This wasn’t a concept. It was felt. My body softened. My chest opened. The breath moved differently.

And I understood: This is what it means to open myself to life.

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This is what 2025 was about.

Something fundamental shifted in how I relate to reality itself. Not one breakthrough, but a slow accumulation of moments where I chose to soften instead of brace—until softening became the new default.

There’s a spaciousness in my body now that wasn’t there before. A sense of possibility that doesn’t depend on circumstances. An excitement about what’s unfolding that comes from trust rather than hope.

I don’t know how else to say it: I broke into a new way of being alive.

This was the year I deepened into secure attachment with life—and stabilized unconditional trust as the ground I stand on.

There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he stands at the edge of a massive chasm. The only way across is a leap of faith—stepping into what looks like empty air, trusting that the bridge will appear beneath his foot.

That’s what this year asked of me, again and again.

For most of my life, I froze at that edge. I could see where I wanted to go. I could feel the pull. But I couldn’t take the step—not without proof, not without certainty, not without knowing the bridge was already there, not without someone else holding me in it.

What changed wasn’t that I became braver. What changed was that I started to meticulously track the places in my awareness where I wasn’t feeling trust. As my awareness sharpened, trust stopped being something I tried to believe and became something I could feel—a specific vibration in my body that I can now recognize when it’s present and sense the absence of when it’s not.

Now I can catch the moments when I’m out of alignment with trust in real-time. I can feel the gap—the unfelt emotion sitting between me and that ground—and instead of pushing through or overriding it, I can turn toward it. I can feel what needs to be felt to come back.

Nowhere was this clearer than stepping into my sacred purpose. I ran my first couples workshops. I wrote about sex publicly for the first time. Each one felt like stepping into empty air.

And each time, the bridge appeared. I was met, held, and supported in ways my mind couldn’t have orchestrated.

This is what trust actually feels like when it becomes ground: you stop needing to see the whole path before you take the first step. You stop requiring certainty before you act. You start living as if life wants to meet you.

Because it does.

This was the year I broke through a core pattern of enduring life.

There’s a book I’ve come to regard as a bible for healing and being human: The 5 Personality Patterns. It describes five core ways we learn to protect ourselves as children—each brilliant for survival, each costly for living fully. I’ve probably read the book five or six times.

The one that has run my life most deeply up until this year is what the book calls the enduring pattern. You might recognize it: when something feels like too much, instead of fighting or fleeing, you hunker down. You clench against the discomfort. You wait for the hard thing to end. You endure.

It’s the kid who learns that the safest response to overwhelm is to go still and quiet and just... get through it. The adult version looks like tolerating situations that don’t work, resisting your own desires because wanting leads to disappointment, and bracing against life’s intensity rather than letting it move through you.

It’s a survival strategy. And like all survival strategies, it worked—at some point, in some context, it kept me safe. But it also kept me from fully engaging with life. You can’t reach for something while you’re braced against it.

2025 was the year I broke through it. The pattern no longer runs the show.

In my plant medicine journeys this year, I healed a core abandonment wound that left me feeling helpless and waiting indefinitely to be saved. And in so doing, I melted a deep and ancient freeze in my nervous system that kept me from fully reaching for life. I feel reunited with Life itself in ways that are still rippling.

What remains is different work—the rules I absorbed about how to be, what’s allowed, what’s too much. But that’s next year’s territory. This year, the enduring broke.

This was the year I came out with my sacred purpose.

For years, I’ve been searching for this. Circling it. Sensing something was there but not being able to name it or claim it. I’d catch glimpses in conversations, in the way people responded when I spoke about partnership or projections or sex as a spiritual path. But I couldn’t land it. I couldn’t say: this is what I’m here for.

This year, it finally clicked into place.

There’s still much I don’t know, and yet there is also a knowing that has settled into my body. I’m here to guide couples across thresholds of truth—to help them see that their partnership is a portal for awakening, that ruptures are doorways to secure attachment, that their sex can be a transformative path to meeting what’s real.

The clarity didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated—each step I took revealing the next, each leap building trust that there was more to step into.

I wrote about sex publicly—multiple times. I wrote about not just the models and the abstractions, but the lived texture of my own partnership, my own body, my own edges.

I shared my story about losing my virginity at 35. The one I’d shared privately and written about in private circles but never owned publicly. The shame I’d carried for decades about what happened and who I was. I pressed publish and felt my heart pound and trusted that I would be held.

I ran my first three couples workshops at my home. I transmitted what I’ve learned about projections, about the truth that partnership can be a portal for awakening, and embodied practices for working through them.

I reclaimed Co·Awaken—a container I’d created last year but never used—and gave it new life and direction. It’s now the vessel for everything I’m here to offer the world. And I can feel it taking shape, becoming real.

The leap was scary. It was trembling and uncertain and required everything I had. But I leaned into trusting that when I move from truth and beauty, I will be held.

And I was.

This was the year I broke through the problem-solving frame and learned to create from beauty.

For most of my life, my creative energy was organized around solving problems. I would identify a problem—in my life, in my work, in sex, in the world—and creation was the way to make it right.

This year, something different emerged.

The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz helped me see that problem-solving and creation are fundamentally different systems. Without problems as the orienting frame, I’m feeling access to so much more possibility.

For the first time in three attempts, I completed The Artist’s Way—twelve weeks of morning pages and artist dates and cracking open the places where creativity had calcified. Through that process and Kelly Wilde Miller’s Prismara container, I discovered what it feels like to create from vision instead of from problems. It’s connected me with a way to move from what’s true and what’s beautiful and what’s real—not from a place of needing to do something to be okay.

There’s a reunion happening with life force, with creative energy, with sexual energy. They’re not separate—they never were. And when I’m creating from that place, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like making love to reality.

I have my first embodied glimpses now of what it means to create my life as art, with no problem in mind. Not to solve my life but to create it—from beauty, from devotion, from desire. And I can feel how as I build Co·Awaken, even the website was created from beauty as an organizing principle.

This was the year Kiki and I became true co-creators—first as parents, now in our offerings.

Ember is fourteen months old now. And what I can say is this: Kiki Candace Sauve and I have become an excellent team.

We’re more attuned to our own nervous systems and to each other’s. We know when we’re parenting from authentic desire and presence and when we’re doing it from obligation. And in owning our true limits, we’ve been able to get the nanny support we actually needed to be a thriving family.

I feel us becoming leaders as conscious parents in our community. Friends tell us they look up to how we’re doing this—that watching us paves the way for something new in their imagination of what parenting could be. With secure attachment as our north star, it’s clear what is and isn’t in alignment, which makes it easy to feel deep trust in our shared philosophy.

Kiki and I have wanted to co-create offerings together since the beginning of relationship. It’s clear that parenting together is co-creation. It always was. The way we navigate travel, support each other’s needs, know when we’re hitting our limits and ask for help before we break—this is the prototype. This is us learning to build something together without our patterns hijacking the process.

A friend in a mastermind two years ago told us something hard to hear: we needed to come into our own sovereignty before we could truly co-create offerings. She was right.

This December, we crossed a major milestone and started serving tea in our home as a paid offering to our community. It felt like a natural next step—just presence, just service, just the sacred field we’ve been cultivating together. All the patterns still show up. But instead of collapsing into them, I feel us meeting them. Owning what’s ours. Not without friction, but without the old confusion about whose stuff is whose.

The ground we built through parenting is now holding something new. And I’m excited to see what wants to emerge.

This was the year I began meeting the fear stored in my body.

Through the Grinberg Method, I discovered something I didn’t know was possible: direct contact with fear itself.

Not processing fear through story. Not understanding where it came from. Not even releasing it. Just meeting it—in the body, as sensation, without flinching.

Fear lives in places I didn’t know had memory. In the subtle bracing of my right calf. In the holding pattern in my shoulders and hips. In a tightness low in my pelvis that I’d mistaken for how bodies simply are.

And when I meet it directly—without making it mean anything, without needing it to change—something shifts. The fear doesn’t disappear. It integrates. What was locked as tension becomes available as energy.

I’m just beginning. But there’s something so exciting about knowing this territory exists—knowing that layer by layer, I can meet what’s been frozen for decades and let it move again. The excitement about what becomes possible here is one of the most alive sensations in my body right now.

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If 2024 was the year I hit escape velocity—breaking free of the gravitational pull of my trauma—then 2025 was the year I landed somewhere new.

Not on solid ground in the old sense. Not certainty. Not safety manufactured through control.

But ground made of trust.

Trust that I can soften instead of brace. Trust that desire is safe to follow. Trust that when I step into the unknown, the bridge will appear—maybe not in the form I expected, but it will appear.

I feel the vibrant tingles on the edge of my skin now, living on the threshold of uncertainty and mystery. I’m not waiting anymore for life to become comfortable enough to finally relax into.

I’m already here. Already held. Already home.

This was the year trust became ground.